There stands the bride. Perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect fake tan. She may not have slept the previous night or eaten for six months but, still, she’s beaming. And there behind her stand the bridesmaids. All 95 of them.
‘My sister-in-law asked how much weight I could drop because the dresses only went up to a size 12’
When Kathryn McGowan got married in County Down this month, she couldn’t decide which of her pals should have the honour of holding her train and checking she didn’t have lipstick on her teeth. ‘It was quite stressful,’ she said of the dilemma, ‘and then one day the idea came to me.’ Instead of having the average number of bridesmaids (in the UK, this is three to five), she’d have 95 of them, aged between six and 40.
The colour scheme was ‘champagne and cream’, but nobody had to be matching, presumably because it was too difficult to find a neckline that worked on children as well as women approaching perimenopause. In a radio interview a week or so after the wedding, the groom joked that his best man was ‘still dancing’.
If you’re on bridesmaid duty this summer, consider yourself fortunate if, like the Irish lot, you get to pick your own dress. This is less and less often the case. Instead, bridesmaids are often shoehorned into sludgy green, peach or maroon, a shade more normally used for Travelodge curtains (in fact some frocks could double for window dressings). They hang shapelessly, clinging to the wrong bits, they’re polyester and it’s a hot day, and why did these women even say yes to being a bridesmaid in the first place? ‘Say cheese,’ coaxes the unbearably chirpy photographer, and – wearily – they all try another smile.
As we stagger into another wedding season, will nobody think of the poor bridesmaids? Because although weddings have become bigger, more expensive, more outlandish, more and more designed for social media, the bridesmaid experience hasn’t changed much. It’s a demanding, tiring, often expensive and certainly sweaty process, and you rarely get to look nice on the big day. Instead, you look like a lampshade.
We’re talking big bridesmaids here, not flower girls – although the little ones can also cause problems. Did Meghan really make Kate cry over Princess Charlotte’s tights on the big day? It has the ring of truth about it. One friend was incensed to receive a bill for her two small daughters’ silk bridesmaid dresses as soon as her new sister-in-law returned from honeymoon, ‘having never been asked or told we would need to pay’.
The cost of bridesmaid dresses – and the question of who pays for them – often causes trouble. Whole pages of Mums-net are devoted to this important topic. The rule, largely, is that if the bride is dictating what her bridesmaids wear, then she should cough up. But there are grey areas. Sometimes you’re given a colour and expected to buy your own (it’s unclear whether the Irish bride paid for all 95 dresses, but let’s say she probably didn’t). This option, I suggest, is better than being forced into a magenta halterneck number alongside five other women in the identical dress. There is an Oompa-Loompa air to all being in the same outfit.
‘The worst are those “multi-way” dresses,’ says a mole who’s recently suffered through a Home Counties wedding. ‘No place to hide a bra, so I ended up sewing some of the other bridesmaids in on the way to church. We all looked hideous. It’s the closest I’ve come to falling out with the bride in 30 years.’ Another friend was once demoted from maid of honour to ‘standard’ bridesmaid because she tried to veto spaghetti straps on the bride’s preferred dresses. ‘The sequinned tulle dresses are the worst,’ says someone else. ‘The dress genuinely made me question how much my best friend loved me.’
All sense of decency seems to vanish when it comes to bridesmaid dresses. ‘My sister-in-law asked how much weight I could drop in advance because the dresses she wanted us in only went up to a size 12 and I was a 14. It’s the worst I’ve ever felt,’ laments another poor soul in bridesmaid recovery. Asda, it’s perhaps worth noting, have just launched a line of bridesmaid dresses– sizes eight to 24 – starting at a mere £24.
You can get your own back, however. One recent bride says that she discovered a bridesmaid had stuck her Ghost dress on Vinted and got £250 for it immediately after her wedding: ‘I was very tempted to ask for the cash back.’
Another problem that can occur, of course, is when someone isn’t asked to be a bridesmaid. ‘I know someone who assumed she’d be a bridesmaid but wasn’t asked,’ whispers a source, ‘so she found out what the bridesmaids were wearing and then wore the exact same shade of pink on the day.’
Drama, drama, drama. Although page boys don’t necessarily have it that easy, either. Aged seven, my father had a tantrum at a wedding in Hampshire because he wasn’t allowed to wear a sword with his Hussar outfit, unlike all the grown-up ushers. So it’s not just the girls who can be reduced to tears.
Sophia joined The Edition podcast alongside journalist Francesca Peacock to discuss whether being chosen as a bridesmaid is truly an honour, or just a pain:
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