Blogatron

don't choke, but i was thinking of checking out ann taylor loft for that very thing. they've done me well in the cute-not-too-expensive-dress-for-wedding department before.

and hello, are you coming here next week or no?

Consignment shops are all the rage up here;--and some of them have some pretty good stuff. Would think the pickin's would be even better down in your neck of the woods. Surely such must exist in Bahhhhston.--??

I second the Ann Taylor Loft suggestion, although I dress kinda preppy, so it might not be your thing so much. I also buy a lot of dresses (well, very few dresses, but a high percentage of the dresses that I buy) at Old Navy. But I'm extremely not picky and also extremely cheap.
What do you think about white dresses at weddings? Someone wore one to mine (totally white, no print) and I thought that was not something I myself would have done.

All-white dress? I can forgive it if you're under 13, but otherwise I think not! A print with a white background, or a white top or skirt, I think is pretty universally okay now (right?). But if I were dead broke and had nothing in my closet but a white and a black dress, I'd go with the black.

Weddings are so weird - they really bring out like 90% of the etiquette tangles that most people ever encounter nowadays. But you know? Someone else's wedding is not the place to work out your issues with archaic modes of behavior. Give it a few decades for the white dress dealie to pass out of fashion, then wear whatever you want. But in the meantime, do you really want all your friend's relatives remembering you as That Inappropriate Woman How Dare She?

I would add H&M, Banana Republic and JCrew (sale racks) to the list of places worth checking out. The white taboo assumes the bride is wearing white, right? I tend to agree with Hilatron, that large mixed company happy event is not the place to make a "statement". But, I believe that the Queen wore white to her son's recent wedding, and if she is not up on the etiquette, I don't know who is.

You know? I don't think I would wear a white dress even at a colorfully-dressed bride's wedding (setting aside the fact that I would not, under any circumstances, wear a plain white dress for anything because OH HOW UNFLATTERING THAT IS ON ME [see: my high school grad photos]). The bride-in-white thing is still so iconic that I think I would feel vaguely uncomfortable about it, even though I personally am not committed to that particular icon over the bride in, say, blue or red or whatever the hell else she wants to wear. I am not sure, however, what the etiquette gods have to say about such a situation.

Have I tapped some sort of inner crazy old white-gloved traditionalist, or what? Yikes.

I wonder if the emergence of more and more brides wearing different colors will help everyone relax, or freak us all out even more as guests scramble to find out what she IS wearing so we can all buy new frocks to avoid that color, while meanwhile, we all have food on the table and a roof over our heads and THIS is what we find to worry about?!? Human society makes a robot's head hurt sometimes.