It’s Sunday morning, and my sisters and I are piled on my grandmother’s bed watching TV. If we were home right now, we would be getting ready for church, but our grandmother isn’t religious and so we engage in a different kind of Sunday ritual at her house: Say Yes to the Dress. As dozens of white dresses parade across the screen, we debate which is prettiest, which the bride will choose, and whether her mother’s comments are helpful or bitchy.
If you haven’t heard of SYTTD, go spend a few hours watching clips from the show’s 19 seasons and 2 locations (Kleinfeld’s in New York is superior; you can fight me on this). Here’s the basic premise. Bride needs a dress. She has a huge budget. To help decide, she brings an assortment of friends and family, helpful and unhelpful. She tries on three dresses before she decides which one to say “yes” to.
The reason for my long-standing attachment to the show is simple. Growing up, I lived and breathed weddings. My dad, an Anglican pastor, regularly officiated the weddings of family friends, and I imitated him at every mock playground wedding, looking sternly at my friends and reciting, “Do you take this woman…?” But my obsession mostly grew at my grandma’s house, where I spent afternoons paging through wedding planners’ books and trying on stowed-away wedding dresses with my sisters. Each dress told a different story: my grandmother’s dress, so tiny I’ve never been able to fit it…my aunt’s, a poofy product of the ‘90s, covered in hand-sewn seed pearls…my mother’s a stark contrast, extravagantly simple…and the ancient great-great-grandmother’s dress, yellow with age. We pulled out photos of that last wedding, the bride shaking with laughter, her husband’s barely-contained grin.
My perspective on weddings in general, and SYTTD in particular, evolved with every passing year. At eight, weddings seemed wonderful because they were an excuse for a party and a pretty dress, with the groom as an afterthought. At boy-crazy thirteen, weddings were not only the most important day of one’s life but also the end of all unhappiness. Once the vows were said and the bouquet was thrown, the bride and groom rode off into the sunset and never argued, fought or got fed up with their in-laws.
Now that I’m eighteen and a cynic, weddings are a big question mark. Is there really any guarantee of happiness at the end? I wonder. All the little conflicts on SYTTD between the bride and her parents, sisters, in-laws, or fiancé could be overblown to make the show more dramatic, or they could be cracks in relationships that will eventually grow to fissures. The main conflict on the show is always the bride having to defend her favorite dress to her friends and family. As she inevitably falters before their disapproval, I’m reminded of shopping with my maternal extended family. I know the pressure of standing in some boutique’s dressing room before your grandmother, mother, aunts, sisters, and female cousins as they give their opinions on a dress you thought was cute. I know all the soft-pressure techniques the brides use to try to convert the dissenters. I know the happiness of finding something everyone likes, and the disappointment later on, when you realize you actually hate it.
But if Say Yes to the Dress has a message, it’s this: It’s your wedding and your choice. The hosts and assistants are masters at helping the bride realize this. In one episode, the bride’s mother belittles, degrades and gaslights her daughter until she ends up rejecting the dress she loved. At the end of the episode, the bride sits down with Randy, the New York host, and says “I don’t know what to do.” They talk about the situation, and Randy tells her, “At some point, you have to think about not disappointing [yourself].” Hearing Randy give that bride his support and room to voice her opinions almost had me in tears. Although we never find out whether the bride ended up getting the dress she loved, she ends the episode by standing up to her mother. That’s the power of Say Yes to the Dress. It may be a formulaic reality TV show with predictable outcomes (she’ll find a dress, someone will cry), but it’s also surprisingly empowering.
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