Red Zebras and Weddings

I went dress shopping today.

My lovely friend Emily is getting married to her lovely fiance Jin next Friday, and it was therefore necessary for me to buy something fabulous to wear to the wedding.  The best dress that I currently own is five years old - I wore it to my high school graduation - and even though it still looks great, I figured it was time to have another dress.  But, I've also been more purposeful keeping to a budget lately, and I didn't want to spend a ton of money when I had one that, technically, I could wear.

So I set myself a $20 budget and drove to Ross.

I'd only been to Ross one time before today, and that was with an SUV full of guys whom I'd just met on my summer mission trip to Santa Cruz.  We all needed to buy pillows.  Apparently I was the only girl on the project who hadn't packed a pillow, but all these guys had also forgotten one and so we all went on a pillow-purchasing adventure.  It was awkward, mostly because I get all shy around new people and rarely drive in SUVs full of football-player-esque boys.  Anyway, since living here in Dallas, I've heard several friends talk about how Ross's is a good place to get cheap dresses (it's a store of the TJ Maxx/Marshalls variety), and so I thought I'd check it out.

Sometimes you have to dig for dresses.

The friends were definitely right - walking into the store I was greeted immediately by several long racks of dresses, and set to shopping.  I've dropped a dress size since the beginning of this year (woot!), so I had a lot of options to choose from...it seems like the smaller a size you are, the more things there are in your size.  At least, this has been the case in my experience, where in both hips and feet I have always been above average (one might say I have "excelled" in these areas).  Anyway, after about 15 minutes of digging through the racks, I bopped off to the dressing room with 7 dresses in hand.

Out of these seven dresses, 5 of them didn't work.  Too short, too tight, too professional looking...whatever the problems were, my choice eventually came down to two dresses.

The first of these was a flowy black and cream colored dress in a vintage looking print with a faux-lace look about it, with a boat neck and a black ribbon around the middle, and vertical seams as accents.  It actually looked a lot like a dress that I fell in love with last year while looking for a graduation dress, but which I couldn't afford...so naturally I got all excited when I saw this look-alike dress, and snatched it up.  It fit very well, and was all light and airy and pretty, in that 1920s romantic style kind of way - very wedding appropriate.  And it was marked at $19.99, originally $80.  Two thumbs up.

The second dress was red with a black zebra print and a deep V-neckline, with a black broach at the waist.  I put it on, and was kind of shocked - because I looked HOTT.  That's hott with TWO T's, people.  It was quite possibly the best dress I've ever put on in my life.  It was fitted, but not overly tight, and accented all the right things.  I looked, dare I say, sexy.  But in a classy way.  I looked like the kind of confident attractive movie heroine who all the men fall in love with.  And this dress was only $17.99.

And here I reached my dilemma.

Are red zebra stripes appropriate for a wedding?

Not okay.

I deliberated over this question for a good, long time.  I looked GOOD in that dress, there was no denying it.  If I was going salsa dancing somewhere, or if I was going to a cocktail party or something, it would be absolutely perfect.  But I'm going to a WEDDING.  A wedding is a classy affair, where the focus should be on the bride, and not on a) that hott girl in the red zebra dress or b) that tasteless girl who wore zebra stripes to a wedding.  Furthermore, weddings are places where LOTS of photographs are taken.  I was thinking on the way to the store about wedding portraits, and thinking about how if I was getting married I would go with a classic and elegant dress so that 10 years later I wouldn't look at my photos and only see the most notorious trend of the year (like those wedding dresses from the 80s that look like marshmallows).  Nobody wants to be the unwitting bearer of an unfortunate fashion statement a la Princess Beatrice's hat, wearing something daring and "fashionable" only to regret it later.  Do I want to be the girl who, when Emily and Jin are looking through their wedding pictures in 20 years, gets laughed at because of her oh-so-trendy dress that now looks ridiculous?

Probably not.

As awesome as the dress was, and as amazing as I looked in said dress, the more I pictured myself wearing it at a wedding, the more out of place it seemed in my head.  Besides, the fitted quality of the dress, while making me look absolutely fabulous, was also threatening to give me a heat stroke at a July Dallas wedding.  The other dress, being all flowy and pretty and whatnot, would be a lot cooler in the summer heat.

And so, reluctantly, I handed the red zebra dress over to the dressing room attendant, along with the other five reject dresses, and bought my vintage-style romantic dress.  Maybe not as eye-catching, but definitely lovely.  And I tend to go more toward lovely in my style than toward sexy.  I did briefly consider buying both of the dresses, but since that would double the $20 I'd budgeted, I decided against it.  Besides, the only other place I wear dresses nowadays is to church.  And are sexy red zebra dresses appropriate for church?

That's a whole other debate.

But, the fact remains.  I looked GOOD in that red zebra dress.

The winning dress