Over the last week I watched a lot of episodes of Say Yes To The Dress.
We ended up with access to Discovery+ in August leftover from watching the Olympics, and my word there is a lot of trashy reality TV on there!
I hadn’t watched that kind of thing in a long time, especially not American reality TV! There are a hundred DIY shows and a million dating shows to browse, but eventually I came across SYTTD and it became an unlikely cosy comfort watch.
Now I want to make clear – I’m not a wedding person. I have never been a romantic. I have not grown up imagining getting married, I have never dreamed of a wedding gown! Recently we’ve talked about the merits of marriage for legal reasons, and that it makes things smoother if anything happened to either of us. So my current position is I am up for getting married at some point but I don’t particularly want a full on wedding.
The idea of spending thousands of pounds on an oversized dress I’d only wear one time is insanity to me. It blows my mind how casual these people are about dropping $2-15K on a one time outfit! A lot of them seem to be just normal people too.
I assume that since the US is more conservative people really do save up their whole lives to pay vast sums of money for wedding stuff!? Nobody seems to bat an eyelid over it.
So I was definitely watching Say Yes To The Dress in part for the morbid curiosity!
However, eye watering sums of money aside (and ignoring the patriarchy of it all), it’s also actually really uplifting to see how special the ladies feel! They always find dresses that the bride feels amazing in whatever her body type, and I find it so interesting how the same dress can work on different people, and to see how they pull the whole look together with the veil.
I could still never picture myself even trying on one of those monstrosities though! Even the idea of trying them on and having to stand there in the middle of the shop being judged by family or friends is a no thank you from me!
I watched mostly the US one set at Klienfeld’s in New York because I do like Randy! I skip around the seasons to see how things changed, but I definitely prefer the earlier ones before the store got super busy with people clearly there for the TV, and Shay joins to perform for the camera.
It was interesting to me that nothing really changed in the wedding dress styles over 20 seasons except for now they do blush colour dresses and more sparkly micro-sequin fabrics which I really liked.
I watched some of the UK one too which is a bit less up market and evidentially a shop in a shopping centre (with the guy who designed Princess Diana’s dress apparently), and the budgets were more consistently around the £1.5k mark.
Our subscription to Discovery+ is ended now but that’s fine, I definitely have had my fill of wedding gowns! 😂
