When I first started wedding planning, I’m not sure I consciously realized how much pressure their was to buy All New Things. I mean, I’m not dull, I was aware that the pressure to spend was unhealthy, but there were things I took for granted. Wedding shoes, for example. Every blog I read, every magazine I read, every thing I read no matter how indie or how mainstream talked at length about wedding shoes. I obviously was not going to wear some traditional ugly-as-sin white ‘bridal’ shoes, but, considering I was wearing a short dress, I figured shoes would be key. And *everyone* cares about wedding shoes, right?
But here is the thing. I’ve been keeping my eye out for fantastic wedding shoes for six months now. My requirements were that:
1) They could be expensive-ish as long as they were still in my realm of spendy-but-sane.
2) They had to be fabulous.
3) They had to make my dress look even hotter than it already did.
4) If they were spendy, they had to be something that I would realistically wear again.
Reasonable rules, no? Well, here is the thing, six months later, I still haven’t found anything that fits the bill, or even comes close. My dress is hard to match, I’m very particular, and I’m a terrible shoe shopper because I have no patience.
I didn’t have a big lightbulb moment, over the past few weeks the light slowly started to turn on. “What if,” I thought, “What if I wore those fabulous silver shoes that finally found after years of looking‌ the shoes I’ve been wearing every time I try my dress on. What If I just wore those?” So I asked my friend Lauren, indie-bride-extraordinaire, and her advice was basically this ‘Wedding shoes are overrated, and any shoes that I would like to love and cherish for the rest of my life are not the kind of shoes that would go with a wedding dress. Just wear the shoes you’ve got.’
Right. (Shakes head hard as if getting water out of ones year). Yes, that makes SENSE.
Once I crossed the Rubicon and considered wearing *shoes* to my *wedding* that I already *owned,* was like there was no looking back. Dress for our Aufruf? Well if I happen upon something cute, great. If not? Cute black dress in the back of my closet. Outfit for our welcome picnic? If I find something cute, awesome. If not? Cute top I got on sale for 60% off. And clearly, if I find the worlds most awesome shoes between now and August, we will become friends, but until then, I’m not worried. I’ve got a killer pair in my closet.
We all know the rhyme about our wedding day, “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” But I think most of us think about it as, “Well, everything will be new, so I need to figure out my something old/borrowed/blue.” But maybe we need to reconsider the order of things. Maybe lots of things will be old or borrowed, and we need to figure out our something new.
I’m not a martyr (trust me!) I just happen to have a closet full of things that I’ve painstakingly selected over the years because I love them. Why let all that sense of SELF go to waste so I can have the hot shoes of the moment? There are advantages to shopping my closet – I already like what’s in it.
And heck, we’re already letting our attendants shop theirs.
Picture: the shoes in question at David’s brothers wedding. And yes, I wear vintage 50’s cocktail dresses everywhere. The short wedding dress was a obvious choice, no?
