Finding a Mother of the Bride Outfit

At long last, I can finally share with you my mother of the bride outfit!

Way back in October 2019, roughly six months out from the planned Big Day, we hit the shops (little did we know there was a coronavirus curve ball lurking which would change the world forever …) .

We’d previously checked out some of the online offerings, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Talk about “50 Shades of Grey” – clearly fashion merchandisers think that the mother of the bride should just disappear into the woodwork!

While I certainly didn’t want to outshine the bride (not that there’s much chance of that, she is always GAW-JUSS!), I still wanted something special, all while taking her dress and the colour theme of the wedding into consideration.

We also had plenty of giggles over some of the outfits the online stores deemed as suitable for a mother of the bride. I mean, we are mostly talking women in the 50+ age bracket, a time in our lives when we are perhaps not as slender as we once were. Nor are we keen to expose our (often saggy) arms, midriff, decolletage, pot belly etc.

Still none of our online search results were quite as hilarious as this screen shot which was the response when a friend was looking at “what to wear for a graduation” (check out the pic at the bottom left)!

As luck would have it, I lost my heart to the very first outfit I picked out!  Yes, even with the challenge of dressing my now plus-sized figure.

It definitely helped that I went armed with the knowledge of my best colours (autumn palette) and style personality (natural/romantic).

However I still made a point of trying on a range of frocks, even knowing they probably wouldn’t make the grade. Because otherwise, how would I have known the right outfit if I didn’t know what the wrong ones looked like?!

What’s Wrong with these Dresses?

Most dresses had no sleeves, which isn’t my preference because of my tuckshop lady arms / bingo wings / whatever you want to call them.

This one was a bit too low cut (though you can’t see it in the photo).

Some were in the wrong colours …

Some dresses looked great – but just weren’t quite ‘special’ enough …

Or, I didn’t like the neckline …

While this Sacha Drake dress looked great in the picture, it wasn’t as flattering to my figure in real life.

We spent a lovely day at our closest large shopping centre – Carindale – and it was fun looking in boutiques that I’d never even entered before. I don’t have much call for special occasion wear, and am usually very budget-conscious in my fashion purchases. But my daughter insisted that this time we went shopping without looking at price tags (scary!), in our search for this once-in-a-lifetime dress.

While department stores like Myer and David Jones are a great place to start, there are several boutiques or labels which I recommend for mother of the bride outfits:

• Review
• Alannah Hill (which is where my dress is from)
• Sacha Drake
• City Chic (for larger sizes)
• Cue (for smaller sizes)
• Decjuba
• Jacqui E
• Kitten D’Amour
• Noni B

As far as price tags go, most of the outfits we looked at seemed to be in the $200 – $500 range.

It’s quite possible that this is the second-most expensive dress I’ve ever purchased in my life (the most expensive being my own wedding dress, which I purchased for $800 thirty years ago – and that was “preloved”, if I’d bought it new it would have been over $2000).

But it seems I have a real knack for sniffing out a bargain even when I’m not looking at the price tag – because the dress I ended up buying was reduced by 40%. Not bad!

The husbear loved my choice, which was just the icing on the cake.

When I first published this post back in 2019, I couldn’t do a big reveal; but now the wedding has taken place I can finally share it with you 🙂 .

Here are the photos from the fitting room (love a dress with a bit of twirl!):

And here’s a photo from the Big Day:

I teamed my dress with a pewter clutch bag and heels, and although it wasn’t meant to be a winter wedding, I ended up making it work with a wool wrap in the same colour.

I wish I had better pictures to show you, but I was so “in the moment” on the day that it didn’t even cross my mind that I should get a photo to show off my outfit. Proud mama – bad blogger!

The only other issue was that when I tried the dress on at the beginning of this year, it was rather snug – those darn corona kilos. Since then however I’ve lost nearly 5 kg so I was back to my previous size.

I’m calling it my “Goldilocks” dress because it was “just right” – I’m sure that I will wear it to the next awards or other special event I attend!

PS If you enjoyed this post, check out my blog about Choosing a Mother of the Groom Outfit!