Advice for buying a mother of the groom dress is honestly something I thought I would never offer to anyone else. Because I have a son getting married this year I was faced with what I thought would be the simple task of purchasing a dress to wear to the event. As I quickly discovered there is more to this dress buying thing then one might expect. As any dutiful mother I wanted to do it up right and make my son both happy and proud. Along the way I found out a few things about buying a mother of the groom dress that might come in handy to others out there also facing this apparently simple task.
1.Know the rules. Beginning to do any task is always the hardest thing for me but I found that the job became a little bit easier if I got a handle on the basics. Talking to several friends who have already been through the chore and browsing through a half dozen magazines I kept coming up with what seemed to be almost rules about buying a mother of the groom dress. One rule involves removing two colors from your list of possibilities. White and black should be left off your list of potential color choices. White belongs to the bride and you don’t want to suggest you are in mourning over the wedding by wearing black. For folks who wear a lot of either it really is kind of significant to know that unwritten rule. For everyone else it just means reducing the number of color choices by two.
2.Courtesy Counts. I also learned that it is quite appropriate to check in with the mother of the bride to determine what color she has selected. For reasons I am not totally sure of, it seems the bride’s mom gets first crack at dress colors and style. The mother of the groom, out of courtesy, should try in some way to discover the mother of the bride’s tastes and then try not to duplicate them but not to challenge them either. Once you know what the mother of the bride is going to wear, as the mother of the groom you will reduced your number of possible colors by one and perhaps given yourself an idea about the overall style you will be looking for.
Courtesy also involves talking to your soon to be daughter-in-law about the colors being worn by the wedding party and the style of dress that will be in play. Knowing these things will steer you away from yet another color choice but also give you an idea of what colors will be appropriate and blend . Showing your willingness to work together with the bride and her family on color and style will remove one small concern from the long list the bride will already have for her wedding day.
3. Start Early. You don’t have to buy your dress months in advance but for you own peace of mind, and that of your son and daughter in law, it just makes sense to start your hunt for a dress early in the process. Even if you find yourself shopping out of season for the kind of dress you want, beginning to look a bit will help you to check the best size and style for you. After all, it is quite possible that you have not had to buy a dress of this kind for quite some time, or as in my case, ever. You may even have been away from the whole dress thing for quite some time. Trying a few things on will help you to get in the mood and to remember what you find most comfortable in a dress and what you will want to avoid.
Starting early may not result in a purchase but it makes you feel like you have this matter in hand. Pro activity with regards to the purchase of your mother of the groom dress will keep you from feeling like a victim in this whole process.
4. Set a Target Week. One thing I did find out along the way to buying my mother of the groom dress is that, for me at least, it was very important and reassuring to set a purchase week. Along the way I determined how late in the process I could go before I would really start stressing out about not having selected a dress. I then circled the week before that as my “purchase week”. Notice I said week, not day. Effectively that meant that by the end of that week I would have to purchase a dress, some dress, for the event. It also meant confining any anxiety about the final choice to a single week in time instead of all the weeks prior to the wedding.
Setting a target week for purchase allows you to concentrate on other things during all the other weeks. Carrying the dress anxiety around for months at a time is a great waste of energy. If you know you have a target purchase week already on your calender you can leave all the real worry aside until you arrive at that week . It’s a trick that I learned because I got tired of thinking about this dress. Once I circled the week I felt lots better about the whole process. It didn’t mean I totally stopped thinking about the purchase, it meant that it didn’t have to occupy my thoughts quite so much for which I was most thankful.
5. Bring shoes and a friend. When you get down to that selection week, you will want to use your time wisely and well. So go to the stores you have been pleased with during your early on browsing. When you go make sure you have shoes that are similar to what you will be wearing at the wedding. As there is little chance that you will be going to a wedding in sneakers, this may mean bringing a pair of shoes with you so that you can get an accurate picture of how the dress will look.
Another important thing to bring to your serious shopping is a friend or family member with a reliable eye, a sense of you and the willingness to tell you the truth about your selection. You will be amazed at the dresses that may seem reasonable at the store and ridiculous when you get them home. Having a kind but truthful critic with you will give you that other perspective that can give you confidence in your selection process.
6. Put Things in Perspective. As with any project of any significance, the purchase of the mother of the groom dress can take on an importance totally out of keeping with reality. What I found to be very helpful was to occasionally line up in terms of importance, the purchase of the dress with other things going on in my life. I found, not surprisingly, a huge list of other things happening around me that were far more important in both the long and the short run. My health, the health of my spouse, the relationship between my son and his fiancee, the plumbing in our house, life in Darfour, the Iraq war. When you start checking off other things that really have some importance in your world, the selection of a dress for your son’s wedding is shown to be a very marginal concern indeed.
7.What Works for You. When you finally reach the target week for purchasing that mother of the groom dress, keep the rules about color and style in mind and certainly look for what will be appropriate for the kind of wedding that is being planned. One guide is to think about what the wedding picture is going to look like. You probably don’t want to wear a beautiful scarlet dress, no matter how great it looks on you, if everyone else in that wedding picture is going to be wearing pastels.
But even with the guidelines in mind, the most important thing in selecting your mother of the groom dress is how that dress works for you. You will have to wear it in public for a total of probably 4 or 5 hours. You deserve to be comfortable and not feel like you are in someone else’s clothing. A wedding is an emotional time, you can at least have the comfort of clothes you feel relaxed in. So within the appropriate scheme of colors and style select what you like, not necessarily what anyone else suggests.
Above all remember as you consider choosing a mother of the groom dress, that there really will be life after the wedding. This selection is not the beginning or the end of anyone’s world. So relax and enjoy your choice.
