The 1980s Wedding Dress
THE
The wedding dress was made according to the bride-to-be’s instructions: big, puffy sleeves like the ones on Lady Diana Spencer’s dress from the year before; a V-shaped neckline like Diana’s, except more plunging; and without the ruffles and bow.
The skirt was to be more straight down, no tulle underneath, and the colour a bright white, not ivory as Diana had worn.
The bride intended to wear high heels, so the overall look of the dress had to work with those.
Ladies often didn’t think about the shoes they would wear with a wedding dress until after the dress was made, but the seamstress who created this dress thought it was important.
The whole line, from the top of the bride’s head to her toes, had to work.
Each piece had to complement the other. That’s why the choice of veil was also important, not to mention flowers.
No point having a big dress and a tiny bouquet – the proportions would be off.
Lady Diana had the right idea with her large waterfall bouquet resting against her voluminous skirt.
The seamstress – who sometimes called herself a dressmaker, although that could sound grandiose, and she deplored that – was well known to the bride and her family.
Working from her home in the northern Sydney suburb of Lindfield, she had been making clothes for the girls and women of the area since she was herself not long out of girlhood.
The bride could have gone to a wedding shop in the city, or to a designer – the family had the money for it.
Instead she came to the seamstress, saying she would trust no one else with the most special dress of her life.
The seamstress didn’t think that the shape the bride wanted for the dress would suit her, and tried to gently steer her toward something that would flatter her generous hips rather than accentuate them.
She understood that photographs portrayed things differently from how they looked in life, and worried that the bride wouldn’t like how her hips looked in the wedding photographs, which were obviously important images that she would hopefully treasure.
The bride was not for steering, however, so the seamstress sketched the shape of the dress and the bride approved it.
The bride’s parents paid for the dress upfront – unasked for, yet the seamstress appreciated it. There was a lot of work in a wedding dress, much of it the tending of the emotions of the bride – and sometimes her mother and bridesmaids.
They had three fittings and the bride was thrilled with the dress. She had been losing weight since they began the process – so many brides did – and the seamstress anticipated having to do one last alteration as the day approached.
Except the day never came. The bride’s mother called a week before the wedding and said that the bride had broken off the engagement. She didn’t say why.
Later the seamstress would hear – given the bride’s family lived locally, gossip inevitably reached her – that the groom had taken a job in Western Australia without consulting his fiancée, thinking that she would just accept his choice.
The bride didn’t want to marry a man who would make such decisions without her; she thought it boded ill for their life together.
The seamstress was secretly proud of the bride.
She had once been married to a man who did a similar thing, and she’d gone along with it.
Then he kept making more huge decisions without her, and eventually she left him and took their children back to her parents’ home in Lindfield.
There were times – although she didn’t indulge in them often – when she wondered what her life would have been like if she hadn’t gone along with that first decision her ex-husband made.
If, instead, she’d left him before finding out what he would do next.
True, she may not have had her children. But she would have had her freedom.
So she told the bride’s mother that she wished the young woman well, and that she would refund them the cost of the dress.
‘Absolutely not!’ the mother cried. ‘You’ve done so much work. We wouldn’t dream of it.’
The mother urged the seamstress to sell the dress if she wished. She could do whatever she wanted with it, she said.
It didn’t feel right to sell it, though. Instead the seamstress had it dry-cleaned and kept it in her wardrobe for a while, wondering if maybe she’d come across a bride who wanted a similar shape.
She never did, so eventually she gave it to a friend who was collecting donations for her local charity shop in Mosman. Wedding dresses weren’t easy to shift as second-hand items, the friend said, but as this one was unworn, perhaps it stood a chance.