Thursday, May 30, 2013

Pay Less for the Dress or More for the Stress

I bought a wedding dress.  I went shopping with my mother and tried on a few gowns and barf, barf, barf, I am not all that excited to be a bride.  I do not like white.  I do not like being fancy, pancy.  I found one dress I thought was surprisingly tolerable, although awfully quinceanera-ish, but the price was too high for me to like it all that much (I am cheap).

I went online and found it on amazon.com for a bit cheaper.  Regardless of how much I actually even liked the dress, I bought it (because I can appreciate a good deal).

The next few weeks were filled with intense paranoia as I recall a friend who had bought her wedding dress online and it came out cheap and awful (I like cheap prices, but not cheap looks).  In the end she had to buy a new one and was not able to return the busted one.  

The dress I ordered is not returnable.  Crap.  I email the dress maker with a few questions  and the response is in slightly broken English and poor grammar. I get more worried.  I look up where the dress coming from and it is some place in China.  I start having pangs of guilt that I am contributing to some Chinese sweat shop with awful carcinogens floating around in the air while ten year old children are half naked and starving and beaten and made to sew cheap wedding dresses for five cents a day. 

I look up reviews on the seller...something I probably should have done before financially committing to this whole transaction (need to get one of those bracelets: "what would Trevor do?").  Some reviews are positive.  Some are negative.  The positive ones are again in broken English which makes me think they are staged and written by the person who is running this scam.  Damn, I hate being scammed.  

And what's worse, I realize the seller is called George Bridal....like a cheap knock off of David's Bridal.  I hate David's Bridal.  And this is even a step down from that...his cheap imitation brother, George.  And there's no apostrophe..... more grammatical inaccuracies!

The dress finally arrives in a one foot by two foot duck taped garbage bag.  I do not even want to open it, just throw it in the trash!  I lock myself in the bedroom and anxiously peel back the tape.  Holding onto the 1% hope that this dress might be wearable, I tear open the plastic...and my worst fears are confirmed.  This is not the dress I ordered...

There are circle domes sewed into the bust, with under wires of the torso exposed.  The seams around the waist and down the sides are haggard and exposed.  The material looks like it is made out of a screen window for a tent.  There is no jazzy belt like in the picture.  I want to cry.  I curse myself for being the hasty, cheap decision maker that I am.

Then I realize it's inside out.

In actuality, when it is right side in, the dress is not that bad.  So I will reluctantly pat myself on the back for finding a nice relatively inexpensive dress,  although I still feel slightly guilty about the poor child laborers in China that I might have made up.    I am still talking myself into really liking the dress.  I just cannot get all that excited about a plain white dress.... B-o-r-i-n-g!  I have already taken a scissor to it once for some minor alterations, but I am seriously tempted to slice up some major modifications.  The fact that it was cheap, only eggs me on....  I've done it before...






3 comments:

Joy said...

put the scissors down... you can definitely go to a seamstress and jazz it up julie style =)

GoAskMatt said...

Ha! Jeanette just said she should start everyday reading your blog. It cracked us both up. :-)

Breanna said...

Oh my!! Julie! My heart was breaking and laughing! You (or some professional) need to sew some bright colorful petticoat into the bottom!!

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