Finally: Simple, Beautiful Wedding Dresses!

I've probably have heard the phrase "Less is more" more than just about everyone else on this planet having gone from a degree in Architecture to being a wedding dress designer, but there, I put in writing. It's just true in so many ways. (For you non-artsies out there, the phrase was coined by Architect Mies van der Rohe, but you can call him "Mies" for short. There - banter for your next cocktail party!)

It used to be that to get a true simple yet beautiful wedding dress you had to shell out a lot of your hard earned wedding budget on a top-name designer like Vera Wang or Amsale. The good news is that is no longer the case. They are harder to find, but there are some out there! We've put together some of our simple wedding dresses that don't break the bank here for you to enjoy.



From a designers' perspective it is harder to design a simple wedding dress than a more complicated one. Informal wedding dresses rely on the purity of the lines and are much less forgiving than a dress with a lot more happening. Sometimes a simple concept can fail in the execution and end up looking like a sundress or nightgown! This is probably why they are hard to find in mainstream boutiques.

Buying Your Wedding Dress Online

This was the week of helping out two brides who ordered their dresses from less-than reputable Internet retailers. One bride ended up with a dress eight inches too short. Not exactly a minor detail! The other bride is not happy with her dress overall: essentially it does not match the picture provided on the Web site.

Here is my advice to heed BEFORE ordering from an Internet retailer:

• If the price sounds too good to be true, it is. Beware!
• Find and print the return policy. (This however was no help to one of our brides. Despite having a return policy, the seller is not honoring it!)
• Realize that by paying with PayPal your protection as a buyer is limited to receiving the item or not. If the item is not as described, your recourse is with the vendor, not with PayPal
• Make sure you are seeing the retailer's own photo of the dress in question, or pictures of other dresses that they have made. I can't stress this point enough!
• Order a fabric sample. There is no better way than to see it in person.
• Only order from people you can communicate with easily, preferably by phone. Communication is so important when explaining the details of your dress. An e-mail description is fine to start the process, but a live conversation is must before you finalize everything.
• If your dress design is a combination of several dresses and otherwise hard for you to visualize, it is best to have a designer sketch it out for you so that you are sure that 1) you like the way the elements look together and 2) you know what you will be getting. My company offers this service as of approximately one month now and it is incredibly popular! Custom wedding dress design service.