Photo by Michael Temchine for the Washington Post.
As y’all know, I am a bit leery about the trappings of traditional weddings. This includes, not surprisingly, the whole “Say Yes To the Dress” phenomenon. Spend thousands on a dress you’ll wear once! Live the princess fantasy! The virginal whiteness! The sweetheart neckline! The squee-ing! The unrelenting girly-girlness of it all! It’s like every single cloying gender-normal ideal wrapped in a big toxic bow of paternalism!
So I loved this eye-opening article in the Washington Post with the tagline: Same-sex weddings open the door to finding the right male attire for women. Hallelujah! There are brides out there who don’t want to look like a Disney princess on their wedding day:
This is the sartorial plight of the sporty, the butch, the soft butch, the tomboys, the bois, the “Ellens,” the Big Dykes on Campus, the women who love women but don’t love wearing skirts and really don’t love those girly pleated pantsuits with princess seams and scalloped collars. The women who know how to buy work pants, play shirts, clubbing shoes and everything else, but who do not know how to buy formal wear (really, who does?) and are now navigating the experience for their now legalized weddings.
One of these brides said:
“If you’re a bride wearing a dress, then you have 400 magazines to work from for advice.” But if you’re a bride wearing a suit, Herr says dryly, “we’ve got what Ellen wore. And that’s about it.”
Personally, I thought Ellen (and her wife Portia) looked fabulous at their wedding, but she’s right, Ellen’s wedding suit is fairly femme in cut and color.
For brides–or any woman, really–who prefer menswear, there are websites like DapperQ. Their motto is “transgressing men’s fashion”, but, of course, they’re also transgressing women’s fashion and wedding fashion, which both positively BEG to be transgressed upon. An additional plus is that the newly vocal market has its own queer-friendly tailors:
Up until a few years ago, Victor Dash, the owner of Dash’s formalwear in Alexandria, had never had a woman come in for a suit. Now he estimates that he sees one every month or so. “The first one that called asked if I could make her a suit, and I told her I’d never made women’s clothes,” says Dash, who assumed that the customer wanted him to make her a Hillary Clinton-esque pantsuit. “She said, ‘Well, I’m not looking for women’s clothes.’ So then I said, ‘Well, in that case, I’ve done this thousands of times.’ ”
Part of the uptick in Dash’s female clientele might be due to a rave review he received on So You’re EnGAYged, a blog dedicated to same-sex couples planning their weddings. A few months ago, one local woman went to his shop, then wrote about the excursion on the blog. In pictures, she wears a black suit with subtle crimson pinstripes.
Anything that loosens the stranglehold of the underminer-y Wedding Industrial Complex is a-okay with me. And I love that the legalization of gay marriage is creating even more openness about other aspects of gay women’s lives, including the right to dress and look fabulous according to their standards and not the Patriarchy’s.
And maybe we’ll see some less-expensive models for lesbian teens who want to wear a dinner jacket to the prom!
Amen.
I had a friend who wore a fab yellow sundress and had to fight tooth and nail with her family because it wasn’t a white wedding dress. She spent the “dress budget” as her mom put it on loads of food for the guests.
Who the hell cares what you are wearing anyway? I thought the idea was to celebrate your choices and adventures in life, not a dress made with enough fabric to build a hot air ballon?
Good on anyone who decides to wear whatever they want. It is their choice.
I’m getting married soon and I’m sooooo over the whole wedding dress thing. I don’t want a big white wedding dress, I never have done, I don’t want to spend thousands of pounds on one and I don’t want everyone telling me how beautiful I look on my wedding day as if it was the most important thing that mattered.
I went to a wedding recently and all the comments about the groom were about what a good person he was and all the comments about the bride were about how ‘lovely’ she looked. As if that was her only quality.
I’ve told people I don’t want a dress and I’ve had some pretty dismissive looks and comments. Because if someone breaks with tradition the Universe will end!! So I’m looking for some other much cheaper ordinary everyday smart dress that will look nice. Or I might go dressed as a banana just for the sake of it, that’d shut people up.
I’ve never liked the whole wedding dress thing. Or weddings at all.
Guaranteed if I get married it’ll be in full goth attire, and my guests and wedding party will be encouraged to wear whatever the hell they’d like to.
Doubt that I’ll get married, though.
My mom got married in 1963 in an emerald green knee-length fitted wool number, sort of like some of the work dresses you might see in ‘Mad Men’ It wasn’t a big deal – they were getting married in Bolivia since my dad was working there, and so she just wore her nicest dress. I’m not sure if it’s because of that, but I’ve never had an urge for a “traditional” wedding dress.
@Isa
Please post picture as that is so very cool.
BANANA BRIDE! BANANA BRIDE!
OMG, Banana Bride! And the banana is so…Freudian. It’s transgressive on so many levels…
If I ever get married, I’m going to wear a bright red dress because I am a fallen woman, and because I look much better in red than in white.
We went to the courthouse on a Wednesday morning in our work clothes for the legal ceremony. We had our wedding 10 days later – a barbecue in a local park. We wore shorts and t-shirts.
Our good friend conducted the ceremony, we had food from the local supermarket, the music was my iPod and a friend who brought his guitar. My father started reciting The Princess Bride in the middle of the ceremony. The rest of the guests joined him.
Best. Wedding. Ever.
@Shadow Boxer: Did your dad do the Billy Crystal “Mawwaige!” scene from Princess Bride? I used to threaten my college roommate by telling her I’d stand up at her (very proper) church wedding and recite that bit. LOVE IT.
That is EXACTLY where he started! It was awesome hearing about 45 people reciting the entire speech.
I say go for it. It sure made my wedding even more memorable. Friends are still telling that story 3 years later!
Mawwiage is what bwings us togebbah, todahy!
I think I’ll probably get married at some point in my life (not any time soon… 22 and on track for a PhD, and I want the next step in my life to be determined by ME, not me and a dude who has conflicting needs/wants) but when I do I want anything but the traditional white-dress-proper-blah-blah thing. For one thing, I am NOT comfortable in dresses, and especially not in heels. My cousin’s friend got married in a very pretty dress and her bridesmaids were all in lovely dresses too – but they all wore Converse and colorful wool socks! Awesome! That’s definitely along the lines of what I’m thinking for footwear. As for attire, I just know it won’t be an enormous creampuff of a thing. Not sure what it will be, but I think something themed would be super fun – I once saw photos of a Lord of the Rings themed wedding, presided over by “Gandalf” and held in this gorgeous stone cave-opening place. I would love a nerdtastic wedding like that.
Well, I wore a traditional white dress and felt like a princess on my wedding day and guess what? I loved it!
To each his/her own.
@sarah: to each hir own, indeed!
First off, I have to say, WHOO, butch love! I identify as butch, or otherwise transmasculine (haven’t really found the right label for it, and I don’t know if I really need to), and my aspiration in the near future is to get myself a men’s suit. However, I do typically bind my chest on a daily basis, so perhaps it will be slightly easier for me that way than if I didn’t.
Also, my best friend is getting married this summer, and she’s going to be radiant in a beautiful white dress that she made herself. I am the maid f honour and will be wearing a dress for the first time in years, because she is sadly somewhat close minded about my cross dressing. If I had my way, however, I would be in a suit.
If I do get married (which I would like to), I will most certainly be wearing a suit, whether I marry a man, a woman, or someone else entirely.
I did get married in bright red. And apart from one person saying, “Oh, how, … interesting…” everyone was supportive and enthusiastic about it. Then again, I have cool friends. In fact, one of my friends who was the master of ceremonies, of sorts (we’d gotten hitched legally with two friends at the courthouse several months before the wedding) started off with the whole marriage thing from Princess Bride. We speculated that some of the attendees were thinking to themselves, “Why are they all laughing at that poor man with the speech impediment?” while everyone else was in hysterics.
The getting community together to celebrate aspect of the wedding was so wonderful. And I did enjoy wearing a dress made for me; I almost never wear anything other than jeans & black slacks, so it was a fun change for a day.
Thanks for the great site.
One great result of getting away from traditional wedding dresses would be undermining the parading of the bride as a piece of merchandise that can happen when the dress is revealing. I don’t mean to step on anyone’s toes here. But wedding dresses that are low cut and designed to show off the bride’s assets always seem to me to be a means of saying “look at what you missed, boys”.
Nevermind the (Bullocks, ehere’s the Sex Pistols) Princess Bride bit. Me, if I’m ever deluded enough to get married again, I want the short-SHORT version from Spaceballs:
Priest: Do you?
Lonestar: Yes!
Priest: Do you?
Vespa: Yes!
Priest: Good, you’re married. Kiss ‘er!
I will also be in bare feet, and if I wear a white dress, it’ll be entirely ripped off from Galadriel’s in LOTR. But I’m more likely to wear a red-and-black or orange-and-blue Arwen-type fluttery-sleeves sort of thing, or wench-wear, or jeans, or something. But no damned shoes!
Bast
our plan is:
1. elope.
2. east coast party.
3. west coast party.
& fuck the dress. I’ll wear a style of dress I look and feel best in: wasp-waist, a-line, above-the-knee. Probably gray or blue; I would look like a corpse bride in white.
@chrisbean:
That sounds like us, except for the eloping part (my partner is very into signing the wedding certificate day of, etc)! Are you based on the East coast or west coast?
My mindset was that I was going to pick the kind of dress I’ve always wanted to wear, but had never had (and likely never would again have) the occasion to wear. For me, this was a one-shouldered, long black dress with some subtle beading down the side. I felt sophisticated, beautiful, but most of all, I felt like me. My choice raised a few eyebrows, but had I gone with something more traditional, I would have felt uncomfortable and like I was playing a part. And I figured that the day I was going to vow to spend the rest of my life with another human being was not a day on which I wanted to feel like anything less than exactly who I truly am, both inside and out.
I like the “outfit you’d never find another reason to wear” concept. I’m all about overdressing. Full skirt with polka dots and far too many crystals!
If I were not into dresses, full frock coat or tails, with an appropriate and outrageously expensive tophat. Maybe I’d wear the tophat either way, I haven’t decided.
I boils down to most weddings being essentially costume parties where not everyone wears a costume.
I absolutely love this movement.Wear what you want–it’s your special day!
Wedding outfit? I’m thinking Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter mixed with some atrocious looking poofy skirt. Course I’ll have to find someone to marry first… or date…
I’m with Jex. I love overdressing, but no thanks on the so-called traditional wedding dress. BTW, those fluffy white confections are actually not TWDs; they’re overwrought debutante dresses. Which I guess is why IMO, most of them are a creepy, awkward combo of “childlike innocence” and “sexaaay!” Ew. Fuck that, indeed.
I know what I’m wearing, should I ever get married. I have a pattern for a gorgeous, totally impractical, completely fabulous Alexander McQueen skirt that I’ve been carefully saving for years. I fell in love immediately, but I the only thing I could ever justify wearing it to would be my own wedding. (Good thing I sew, because the original sold for like 6 grand or something. Talk about “impractical” and “fuck that”!)
Also? If I ever get married, SOMEBODY is wearing spats. If it has to be me, so be it, I don’t care. I freakin’ LOVE spats.