Tuesday, May 11, 2010

My Best Friend's Wedding - Frantic dress fiasco

I have a bone to pick with Bloomingdale's - but I'll get to that later.

Zett has asked me to be her matron-of-honor and of course I said yes! This being a pretty casual wedding, she said that I could pick any dress I like, but would like for it to be turquoise. There will be two other girls in the ceremony also wearing turquoise, and our dresses will all be different. 

Great! How easy is this? I get to pick my own dress - whatever style, fabric, and shade of turquoise I like. Piece of cake I thought. I started looking at the first sign of spring. Checked out the winter sales to see if any gorgeous dresses were lingering on racks. Nothing. 

Then I figured I'd wait for the spring/summer fashions to hit the stores - turquoise is the color of the year after all! I'll have no problem.

WRONG!

I have had SUCH a hard time finding a turquoise dress. (Well, at least one that I would wear - I found plenty that are made for 85 pound 16 year olds!) 

As I was coming to my wits end, and the end of my allotted shopping time, I was racing through Bloomingdales and saw this beauty:


Trina Turk Lotus Blossom dress. Regularly $284, but with a discount and some coupon that I didn't have but the salesperson gave me it only came to $154 plus shipping. They didn't have it in my size, but would order it and it would get sent to my house in 7-10 days. Bingo! The dress search was over. I could rest easy.

7-10 days turned into about 17 days before I knew it, and I finally wondered where the hell that dress was? I called the customer service number on my receipt, and was told by the computer generated voice that my order had been cancelled. WHAT!!!?!?!?!?!

So I called customer service again, pressed 0 until I got a real person, who simply told me that my order had been cancelled because the store made a mistake and did not have it in stock. NONE of the stores had it in stock. REALLY?!?!? When I asked him why no-one had contacted me, he said, "it appears as though an email was sent, but then that email was returned." That's because I haven't used that email address in 3 years! I don't even know where they found it! I said, "how about a phone call??" No response. He asked me if he could help me order another dress - I snorted and hung up. UGH! The frustration!

I immediately scoured my shopping websites, reached out to a dress buyer friend, and came up with some options. I ordered this on bluefly.com:



Mikael Aghal jeweled turquoise dress in taffeta. Roughly the same price as the other. It just arrived yesterday.

In the meantime, not to be screwed over again, I called some local bridal boutiques to see if they could help. 

In the back of my mind I had this dress as a back-up also:

Nordstrom - Tadashi - just under $300.

The last boutique I went to was a cute little place that just opened in November called Toast Bridal. The salesperson was so helpful, and understood my panic! Knowing that I wasn't going to be able to order anything in time, she went in the back and dug through some of her samples that hadn't even hit the sales floor. BINGO! I found the dress. It's gorgeous, looked great on (needs only minor alterations), and with a 15% discount for being a sample, was the best price yet!


Love it! Dessy style 2794 in Oasis. I am contemplating having it altered it to knee length. But I REALLY love the way it looks at floor length. Zett says she would love either.

Thoughts?

Oh and here are my shoe choices:



Nina Electra

Or my old standbys:


My Manolo Blahnik Sedaraby in silver - what I wore down the aisle. Classic, gorgeous and comfortable - the shoe of a lifetime :)

Now that the Bluefly dress has arrived, I'm glad I continued to look. Cute, but not what I was going for. Will be sending it back.

Now, what to do with my hair...?

3 comments:

nikki said...

Wow Abby! I absolutely LOVE the final dress choice. Believe me, I had similar panic and fiasco...minus the terrible cancelled order. I love your silver wedding shoes, although both are gorgeous. I personally think you would be stunning in the long version. However, this is a rainforest wedding and anything goes. My dress comes above the knee. I am also having a huge debate. It came with a black sash and I have the perfect black satin shoes to fit but I don't want the black to really stand out and clash. My mom has an orange sash, now I just need to figure out what shoes to wear with turquoise and orange...maybe gold?!? What do you think?
I also thought the flexibility would make dress choosing easier...hummmm :) but it looks like we both found dresses we love and feel good in. Can't wait to see you in panama! You are doing a marvelous job and I know zett appreciates all you have done!
Nikki

Unknown said...

those manolos are my dream shoes. i say wear them as much as possible. they rock!

ZAMS said...

I think Becca may be right. I love the other hot shoes too. But the manolos are beyond fab and it is a special day! Go for it!