Ask the Wedding Professional

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Say Yes to the Dress is a TLC show about women buying their wedding gowns at upscale salons in New York and Atlanta. It is wildly popular, and fairly unrealistic.

I don’t know who told you this, but it is wrong. Wedding dresses do usually run very small–2-4 sizes smaller than street sizes. So if we don’t have the correct size of dress for a woman to try on, we will take her measurements and order her the correct size. We do not, under any circumstances, assume the bride will lose weight. Very frequently women say they plan on losing ten or fifteen pounds or whatever, but we will ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS STRONGLY ENCOURAGE that the bride buy the size she fits in THAT DAY. It is simple to take a dress in a few inches if she does lose that ten pounds. If she buys a dress that’s too small, it’s a serious problem. Most women do buy the size that fits them that day and if they do lose weight, have it altered down in the course of basic alterations. Women who gain a few normal pounds in the course of a year can have their dresses let out a little bit. But absolutely no seamstress would ever alter a gown to measurements of “I think I’m going to lose ten pounds.”

For dresses, we do make every attempt to stay within a budget. Usually we will ask what the budget is, and if it’s firm or there is wiggle room, and whether it includes the cost of accessories and alterations. If a woman says her absolute top limit is $4,000 for a dress, then we will not show her anything that costs over that. At all. But if we’ve shown her everything we have in that range and SHE says “Maybe I could go up to $4500–what do you have?” then we will go up to that. Her green-light. But more frequently there’s a budget with wiggle room–3,000 dollars, but if you fall in love with the $4000 dress on the rack, no big deal. As far as other services go, we will absolutely respect the budget. If a couple says their parents are giving them $30,000 and no more for this wedding? We’ll throw a damn fine wedding and not cost them more than $30,000.

Crap, just a second for the rest.

22

Yes, of course. Very frequently a couple has champagne tastes and a beer budget, and our entire job is to get them to realize what they can actually afford. You just cannot throw a huge black-tie hotel-ballroom affair with a steak dinner for 200 and expect it to cost $7,000. You just can’t. In our initial consultations, we ask the couple what they want in very general terms, and ask what the budget is. Then we give them our opinion, what the wedding of their dreams will cost on average, and send them home with their options–scale their expectations accordingly, find more money, or compromise somewhere. It is relatively uncommon for people to go into debt for weddings. If it’s a gigantic bash that will cost a huge amount, most frequently it’s the parents paying for it, who are not going into debt. I have seen brides take out credit lines or loans, especially for certain aspects (an expensive dress she must have), but generally under $5,000. We absolutely discourage people from taking out loans or going into debt for their wedding. Absolutely. You can have a gorgeous, meaningful wedding without going into debt and you should not have to.

But yes, it is pretty common for the couple to have to readjust what they want when faced with The Actual Cost.

Yep! Flower allergies are not that uncommon, and silk flowers can be a nice and inexpensive alternative. I had one wedding where the bride had her heart set on a huge flower display, but the groom was severely allergic to…most flowers. But we know a florist who works with silk flowers as well as real, and the bride got her huge flowery wedding without sending the groom to the hospital. (It was also less expensive!) As for non-flowers, they’re becoming more popular. It’s trendy now for brides to carry brooch bouquets, or paper flower bouquets or what have you, and I’ve seen some really cute ones. Last summer I had a bride carry a bouquet of paper butterflies. Non-floral centerpieces and decor is also becoming more common, too, which is nice.

Like, fistfights? No, thank goodness. Once one of my bosses was doing a gigantic hotel wedding with 275+ guests, and a couple guys got too rowdy and hotel security had to escort them out, but I don’t think the bride even knew about it. Verbal fights are, sadly, much more common. I’ve had the bride and her mother clash horribly on the wedding day (not that unusual–important, high-stress day, if the relationship is strained or rocky to begin with) and had to mediate to get everyone through–which sucked ROYALLY and necessitated a lot of help from the bride’s sister and bridesmaids. Once my coworker had a wedding where the bride and groom had an awful screaming fight in the lobby outside the reception hall which involved a lot of “WELL THEN WHY DID WE GET MARRIED?” (To the best of my knowledge, that couple from a couple years ago is still married.) Arguments and stress are pretty common, but usually (thankfully) it doesn’t boil over into a full-on fight.

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Only a few. One was a groom planning the wedding while his fiance was serving a tour in Iraq. The couple usually does the planning together or the bride takes point, but I have had a few grooms step up and do the majority of the planning. Contrary to pop culture, a lot of grooms do have feelings about what they want–the food to be served, the music to be played–but it’s less common for them to want to plan the entire thing. I’d say less than 5% we have the groom as point.

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I almost missed this one! Geez, naughty behaviour…I’ve had sisters of the bride become bratty or bitchy out of jealousy. Once I was doing day-of coordinating and I had gone to check on the bride’s dressing room to see how her and her party was doing. The bride was in floods of tears, wrecking her makeup, because her maid-of-honour sister had had an attack of jealousy and informed her “You know, that dress makes you look like a sausage coming out of its casing.” What a shitshow THAT was.

Parents of the couple can be dicey. I had a mother of the groom who wanted to wear a slinky sparkly crimson low-cut red-carpet-style gown with a slit up the leg, which was…awful. Everyone was staring at her. The bride was very upset, the GROOM was grossed out by his mom, the photographer spent the entire wedding trying to focus on the bride and not Attention Seeking Mom, just…bad.

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Dashiki? Dirndl? Kimono? Hijab? Poncho and sombrero? Feather headdress? Leather vest, bell bottoms and platform shoes?

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Whats the average cost/size of most of the weddings you do? Whats your typical price ranges for things? I ask because my wife and I had 250 guests at our wedding and it cost about $20,000, which was obtained through a combination of my wife and I saving up for a year along with a lot of generous contributions from our families. Our catering ended up costing about $1,700 to feed 250 hungry guests dinner, booze was $400, 7-tier cake was $400 (and an excellent copy of a photo of a $2500 cake my wife showed the baker :smiley: ) my wife’s wedding dress was $300, she also saved a ton of money buying flowers wholesale and making her own arrangements. i’m also curious on how involved you saw grooms; i’ll confess my wife did 95% of the work but part of the reason was that I was unable to find stuff within our budget/size (making a nice, cheap, BIG wedding is quite challenging; you usually get 2 of those 3).

My wife was amazing at finding deals- many of the caterers wanted at least 3x what we ended up paying. But i’ve heard where you live plays a big factor too, at least for venue ($3,300 for a community center big enough for 250 people to sit and dancem rented for ten hours) in our case in the Bay Area.

My wife is also a sucker for those wedding shows, though I think its more the smug validation she gets on how great of a deal she got on her dress. I think she would make a good wedding planner because she is really good at negotiating a deal and can find great places that dont necessarily turn up on a google search.

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That’s a good price and I’m glad you got a good deal. But that is VERY rare. We average weddings between $20,00 and $50,000 for the simple fact that weddings that cost less tend to not need or want planning services (though we do some day-of coordinating for weddings less than that), and we don’t really market ourselves at weddings that are going to cost more than $50,000. Although my bosses certainly have done $75,000+ weddings, I personally have not. That’s pretty cheap catering and VERY cheap alcohol, as well as an extremely cheap dress. You got lucky!

As for how involved grooms are…it really depends. I’d say about 40% of weddings, the grooms are playing a major part, making half the decisions, pulling half the weight. Another 30% has grooms who have strong opinions or the final say on one or two big things–say, catering, or the photographer. 25% where they really don’t seem to care at all other than to say “sure” or “no.” And 5% where they do most of the planning themselves.

It’s a really common misconception that our jobs are about finding deals and hidden places. It’s not, really. We already know most of the vendors we work with, and we’re not going to hunt up brand new places all the time. And as for rates…the vendors pretty much set their rates, and while there’s a little wiggle room, there’s generally not a way to save like 75% of their fee. Photographers gotta eat too, you know? 85% of what we do is organizing and planning and referring. It’s really not about finding new vendors and hidden deals–it’s about organizing the 85 small things so the bride and groom can make three decisions, write the check, and have a fun, smooth, no-stress wedding day.

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Have you (or your bosses) done any same-sex weddings? Or, do you expect to? Do you envision that they will be just business as usual, or something different?

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Yes, we have! Not very many, though. I attribute this more to the fact that most gay and lesbian weddings are relatively small affairs and not as likely to want or need the services of a planner, than a bigger wedding. The vast majority of gay and lesbian weddings that I know of via vendors are relatively small ceremonies and receptions. But that being said, yes, we have done some. One of my bosses did a great big fabulous gay wedding which was HUGE–300+ guests, black tie, the whole nine yards. It cost a bundle. It was a gorgeous affair, but a total headache to orchestrate because one of the men had a really hard time letting go and allowing us to do our jobs, and called us CONSTANTLY wanting to change this or that tiny detail or whatever.

By and large I think they’re mostly business as usual. They can be tricky territory to negotiate because the emotions and stress involved can be different from what we’re normally used to (for example, a mother may be totally 100% okay that her son is gay and fully support the wedding and the marriage, but still have a crying fit on the day of the ceremony because of the finality of it all, or the fact that for years she dreamed she’d have a daughter-in-law, or whatever). Weddings bring up HUGE emotions and GIANT family stressors. We mitigate that as best we can, and by and large gay and lesbian weddings are pretty much business as usual, but I certainly won’t tell you they’re absolutely identical.

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Highland Scottish - my honey was a professional bagpiper at the time. Wrap around plaid for all!