Here Comes The Bridesmaid
The Age
Friday July 18, 2003
Puffed sleeves and peach taffeta were once high on a miserably short list of a bridesmaid's fashion options. Not any more, writes Janice Breen Burns.
In parks on the city's fringe any Saturday in spring (rain, hail or shine) the recent reversal of bridesmaids' fortunes is most thrillingly conspicuous. Where once the maids stepped from their gridlocked ring of limousines and horse-drawn carriages, all lacquered curls and dyed-to-matchness, in fanciful explosions of leaf-green and peach and unforgiveable plum-pudding purples, now they emerge (dignity intact) wearing chic little cocktail numbers and fluttering, glamour frocks worthy of the swankiest, swanky do.
Bridesmaids blossomed as wedding etiquette was relaxed and an arm's-length list of possibilities was added to their frock options. Once, they played sisters to a Cinderella bride (many would swear the orchestration of this role was a subtle bridal plot and the witch's principle tools of torment were the Ugly Matching Frocks). Their dresses - emotionally conceived, bitterly disputed, eventually, laboriously designed by committee, and inevitably unsuited to their individual complexion or figure - were disposable after the event because, well, where else were ill-fitting frocks with cross-back lacing, bulbous taffeta skirts and bustle-bows really relevant?
Bridesmaid style, like classic racewear, operated in a parallel universe to fashion. (Rarely the twain did meet in harmony, despite the most earnest bridal efforts.) Those were the days.
They are now gone. Mind you, there are some hugely entertaining exceptions in parks on any Saturday in spring ?
Being asked, at all, to be a maid, was an expensive, mixed blessing. Etiquette demanded bridesmaid's pay for their own frocks and most still do. Perhaps this has helped to fuel the change ("Why should I fork out $1000 for HER crappy choice?"). They lean more now to designs that catch their - more than the bride's - eye. Post-wedding wearability is also a pre-requisite, not a happy accident. Hence the proliferation in recent years of strappy, silky slip frocks and simple sheaths that flatter a hundred figure types, of draped chiffon layers, sheer as smoke, that gather as prettily below the matron of honour's ample bosom as the fourth maid's Wonderbra-ed 32AAs.
Elegant simplicity, rather than a stupendous, hysterical, sartorial statement, has assumed priority in the fraught realm of bridesmaid frock design. Maids shop now (bridesmaids together, sometimes even minus the bride) as they would for a cocktail party, school formal or a charity ball. Now too, the frock more often than not stays in the maid's closet - "My best dress!" - long after her bouquet has withered and possibly, even the marriage.
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CREDITS
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© 2003 The Age
