Vera Wang Fall 2012

As many of you might know, I am a web intern at Bridal Guide Magazine. Bridal Fashion Week in NYC is now over and the press kits full of high-res new collection photos are beginning to flood my inbox. Which is fabulous! One of my current projects at BG is creating our gown gallery, which features the new fall collections from designers. One of the first galleries I was assigned to create was for Vera Wang, THE goddess divine of all things bridal. Yes, I drooled. And yes, my finger might have slipped and the whole gallery somehow ended up on my flash drive. How unusual!

Vera Wang's fall collection is completely in shades of red, from that bright color you paint your toenails in summer to a deep maroon, nearly purple. And the amount of texture these gowns have is amazing. I just had to share because, well, you'll see why.

You can view the rest of the collection here! And you can check out my awesome CMS skillz.

Wedding Dress Details

I was checking up on my favorite wedding blog, Once Wed and I was completely blown away by the dress in the latest post. This site has recently been featuring DIY-style weddings, kind of country and very homey, which I totally approve of.

I'm just in love with scalloping details and dresses or shorts, so this dress made me swoon. Look at all these edges! So adorable! Vintage-looking dresses are the best. The blog linked to the website of the dress maker Chelsea Rose, which was unfortunately under construction. But the site does have a sample lookbook and after flipping through a few pages, I found that custom detailing is their specialty. Take a gander!

(The way the light illuminates this...!)

Anyone can sew piles of fabric together. But not everyone can make it look good.

More Bridal

Whilst at home, I took pictures at my old stomping ground Volle's for my bridal project. I only worked there for a couple months until I transferred to the tux shop in the connecting building. I prefer working fittings for groomsmen rather than brides, but sometimes I miss the general prettyness and fabulous bling that comes with bridal. Peep some of these pics I took! (I was pleased that Volle's has such lovely lighting.)

(I usually don't like bedazzled stuff, but how beautiful is this bodice?) 

Winter Weddings

Getting some inspo today for my multimedia project on winter weddings. I'm super excited about this project. We have to come up with slide shows, a blog, video, moblie app, etc. I'm thinking of what pictures to shoot at Volle's when I go home and how I can shoot a DIY boutonnière already. It's going to be amazing.

What differentiates a winter wedding from the traditional spring or summer wedding, in my opinion, is ELEGANCE.

There's something about a winter wedding that can be so much more “high fashion” than any other season. The cold and the snow make décor and the general ambiance very clean and more expensive seeming. Winter comes with furs and feathers and a sparkle that you don't get in warmer seasons.

Don't get me wrong, warmer season weddings are great. Fall weddings are gorgeous (fall is my favorite season!) But with those themes, you're using warm colors and things like nature and wood and dare-I-say campy sort of décor. Things are made to look slightly DIY and backyard-style. Nothing wrong there, it's just a fact.

Winter weddings have an air of luxury. And the great thing about that is that they take place during wedding off-season, so you would actually pay a lot less for your venue, catering, etc.

(this photo is absolute perfection, icanteven)

The only thing that is a slight drawback (and this is me being nitpicky) is that the wedding dress can become lost in pictures. Wedding pictures outside in the snow are so beautiful, but the gown no longer pops since it begins to blend in with the white background. Make sure you get photos against some other kind of background as well and get detail shots.

My mother always tells me about what kind of wedding her parents had back in the day in Poland. They were married in the winter and taken to the church in a horsedrawn sleigh. To hell with limos if you can have a sleigh! How amazing.

Vintage Bridal

I can't help being sucked back into the bridal world now and then. I've worked in the field for around six years. Gowns, tuxes, even wedding catering (my college gig)... I've seen the whole show from different angles.

At home in Lake Zurich, I worked at Volle's, a family owned dress boutique and its parter, Mr. Tux (Can I shamefully plug here? No joke, all our guys leave with tuxes that fit perfectly. Why? Because I will make you try it on and if we don't like it, we sew it immediately. Anyway...). I'd have to say my loyalty lies with tuxedos though, I only worked bridal dresses for a few months before moving next door to tuxedo-land. I can pin, sew, and re-press sleeves in about 4 minutes flat. I know that brides don't even think about getting ivory tux shirts to match their ivory dress, and would have put an ivory tie with a white shirt. I'm not afraid to yank up the adjustable trousers of a 16year old prom kid fresh out of lacross practice when he wears them about 5 inches lower than where they should be.

Though tuxes might be my tailoring forte, that wouldn't stop me from sneaking next door to stare at all the gowns. We carried the big lines: Maggie Sottero, Enzoani, Casablanca... Matthew Christopher in particular loved us and visited for every trunk show of his that we hosted. Though the tux shop dealt with a lot less bridezilla and hysteria, there was something special about watching a bride find her gown, dimming the lights in front of the main mirrors, and watching as she teared up.

I was gandering at one of my favorite bridal blogs, Once Wed, and I came across a link for vintage wedding gowns. Omgwhut!?! And these are legit, too. They seem so much more simple than many current wedding gown styles. Honestly, you don't need tons of pickups on a taffeta skirt with beading and a sash, along with a huge bustle! Remember when a bit of lace and a clean silhouette used to be enough?

I spent over an hour just looking through these gorgeous dresses and it was really hard to pick which ones I wanted to show here, I kept adding more! The earlies dresses are from the 1920s and go up until the 1990s, which still doesn't seem that long ago to me. But these aren't simple rack dresses, check them out at Mill Crest Vintage ... just don't forget your bib for when you drool all over your keyboard: