What Dressing the Wedding Party Taught Me.

My wife and I had an interesting experience choosing colors and dressing the wedding party. Mostly it was the ties for myself and the groomsmen. As a guy, I always imagined the tie I would wear on my wedding day. When I was a kid, I would finger paint myself in a suit and the tie, the tie was incredible… Okay, that never happened. But it was the only piece of clothing that I really got to decide for myself. I can remember wanting a tie that had an extra color in it that did not go with the colors of our wedding. It was sad to let that one go but I started looking around and finally settled on one that was the perfect color of blue. I bought 5 of them off of Amazon for about 4 dollars each. I was nervous because of the price but buying the same one for myself and all of my groomsmen meant we would all match. Also, it was an easy groomsmen gift.

When the time came, the quality and color were both spot on. I was excited to give them out to my groomsmen. On the wedding day, I gave one to each of my groomsmen. Then, a little too late, I realized that my dad, my father-in-law, and 3 brothers-in-law were all wearing different mismatched ties! At least they had all found ties that worked with our wedding colors, but I kicked myself all day because I had not thought to buy extra ties for them as well. Lesson learned! Buy ties for all the people who you are going to be taking pictures with and want to match!

My wife had a similar experience. She knew she wanted all of her bridesmaids to match but getting bridesmaids dresses can be very expensive. She didn’t want to burden her friends with a fancy and expensive dress that they would never wear again. She also didn’t want to foot the bill for 4 expensive bridesmaids dresses. She went on Amazon.com and found a dress that was fancy enough to be a bridesmaid dress and yet could still be worn to something less formal. What was better is that it only cost 26 dollars! She made sure to check the reviews for quality. When everything checked out she sent the link to her friends and had them buy the dress.

She had thought about giving them a swatch of fabric and having them find a dress that matched, but she really wanted them all to look uniform. Her solution turned out great and it didn’t break our budget!

​The only thing we would have done different would be to get everyone a swatch of fabric ahead of time so that anyone in our immediate families not wearing a dress or a tie could have bought something similar. The color navy blue has a lot of variance and we could’ve solved that problem with a very simple solution.