The Sisterhood of the Traveling Wedding Dress

[View on the web]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( Essay [An Interview With the Woman Who Sold Me Her Wedding Dress]( [The author in her secondhand wedding dress]( Tami and I have never met, and likely never will. There are nearly a thousand miles and one international border between us. We are strangers with no mutual friends; we work in different industries; we live in our own little self-constructed silos half a continent apart. And yet we share something that neither of us has in common with anyone else on this planet. Our lives overlapped like shapes in a kaleidoscope: She sold me her used wedding dress in October, a year and one day after her wedding and a year and one day before mine. I hadn’t embraced dress-hunting with the same ruthless vigor that some rom-com characters do. On my initial exploratory mission to “find out what I liked” at a high-end bridal boutique, I found myself pink-cheeked and sweating nervously under the hot dressing room lights as a sales associate trussed my naked frame into both the ethereal wood-nymph lace-sleeved gowns and the heavy, swishy, bead-bedecked deco numbers that ruled Pinterest at the time: objectively beautiful dresses, but not mine, and certainly not in my budget. I have been seduced by many an impractical garment before. But wading through the world of wedding planning, where an extra zero or two seems to be arbitrarily added to every price tag, I felt steadfast in my commitment to not spontaneously fork over a future mortgage payment on a one-night stand of an outfit. After several months of monitoring Nordstrom’s new arrivals without any progress, I decided to make one last valiant attempt and booked an appointment at a beautiful, vintage-inspired wedding dress boutique, to which I had been lured by the siren song of their cool-girl Instagram brides. That’s where I saw it. It was everything I knew I didn’t want to wear on my wedding day: strapless, for starters (I’m a 34DD and have not played that game since junior prom). Form-fitting. A sweetheart neckline, topped off with an actual, honest-to-god bow. But there was also hardware: the gown was lined up and down with tiny brass rivets. A studded wedding dress. At $3,290 for the brand new gown or a generously discounted $1,700 for the shop’s sample, I knew I couldn’t justify the price tag. Even after the dress zipped snugly but smoothly over my torso, holding my hips and waist like a pair of hands. Even after I stepped out of the fitting room to literal gasps from my mother, sister, and sister-in-law. Even after mourning the dress, and its insurmountable price tag, that evening over chips and salsa. It just wasn’t meant to be, I shrugged. I donned the mask of the Chill Bride and insisted we move on. But that night, still thinking about the glint of brass running up and down my hips, I turned to the internet. I trawled through the pages of wedding resale sites. And then, after wading deep into the pages of [OnceWed](, I found it: one listing. The dress in its full splendor, at a fraction of the sample’s price. The exact measurements of my body, and Tami’s too. 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