When it comes to wedding dresses... big is best (From Brides Dorset)

When it comes to wedding dresses... big is best

10:35am Monday 22nd March 2010 in Diary of a Bride By Sam Shepherd, Digital Projects Coordinator

LADIES, I am on a mission. It may seem foolhardy, nay, nigh on impossible, but here it is: it’s time to reclaim the meringue.

It started so well, as these things do.

A wedding to plan, a dress to buy, a flick through a wedding magazine or two, pausing to linger over a flowing chiffon number, gasp at a lace and tulle tiered confection or coo at a simple column dress.

But disaster struck. At a wedding fair with two of my bridesmaids I wandered past the stall of a Bournemouth-based designer and saw... well.

It was big. Scarlett O’Hara big. It was like it had come straight off the set of Gone With the Wind.

Silver, white roses, gathered folds of skirt, the kind of dress that could stand up on its own.

And I loved it.

I should have known then. Because no matter how hard I’ve tried to look at understated, slimline wedding dresses, it turns out that I’m a big dress girl.

I blame Richard Chamberlain. And Cinderella.

Put me in a dress shop and suddenly I’m having visions of things I’ve not thought about for years.

Think Laura Ingalls Wilder in Little House on the Prairie coming over all excited about her first hoop skirt.

Gemma Craven dancing with the aforementioned Dr Kildare in The Slipper and the Rose.

The dresses in the Ladybird books version of Cinderella. I’m a hopeless case.

Shop after shop lined with row after row of impeccably designed A-line dresses and the ones that make me do a little hop-skip of excitement are the ones you could hold a circus under.

Okay, so I’m exaggerating a little for effect. But only a little.

At this point I said: “What’s wrong with me?”

When did I become a big dress girl?

How is it possible I can share any taste in clothes with Jordan for goodness sake!

I was, to put it mildly, worried.

But then a lovely lady in the bridal shop over the road from the Daily Echo told me to stop being so daft.

“I blame Four Weddings and a Funeral,” she told me.

“It was a cruel thing they did in that film, calling that dress a meringue.

“We hate it when girls buy straight dresses.

“A wedding dress should be big.”

Yes! I thought. When did the big dress become such a bad thing?

I mean, people wore hoop skirts and crinolines for hundreds of years.

Even Grace Kelly’s wedding dress, once voted the best wedding dress in history, is a meringue by today’s standards.

As for Princess Di, hers deserves a place alongside all those traveller girls’ dresses in Channel 4’s My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding – you know, the ones which are so heavy you need bandages to wear them.

Maybe it’s the taint of the eighties that’s put people off.

Maybe it’s the impracticality of not being able to sit, dance, walk, or in some cases breathe.

But you know what? I’ve got a sneaky feeling the big dress is going to make a comeback.

And I’m going to be standing right at the front of the queue.

Because where wedding dresses are concerned, big is beautiful.