We’ve long been sold the idea that you should feel your most beautiful and happy on your wedding day. Not only will you glow with the love you share with your partner, but you’ll also get to wear your dream wedding dress—a sartorial piece of your choosing that can hold a deep meaning and a sizable portion of your wedding budget. With such a big financial and emotional investment, the process of finding this garment should be surrounded by similar feelings of joy, right? Well, if you aren’t a bridal sample size, think again.
Unlike going to a typical ready-to-wear store, it is practically unheard of for a luxury bridal salon to carry an entire size run of gowns for customers to try on. Instead, they will likely carry a bridal size 8 or 10—which is equivalent to a U.S. street size 4-6 or 6-8—and occasionally another option in a size 16 or 18, which is closer to a 12-14 or 14-16. In many cases, when brides come to see a luxury wedding dress trunk show, the only options available from the collection will be runway samples, which are closer to a size 2. If you purchase a gown, measurements will be taken to see what size they can order from the brand’s size chart. If you are outside the scope, you may be required to pay more to create a custom piece to get the same designer look in a larger garment.
In short, it’s quite rare for to-be-weds to try on a dress that feels like a perfect fit before ordering. If you are too small for the sample, stylists will use giant clamps in the back of a garment to adjust it down to your size. Too large? They may leave the dress unzipped, pin it, or add fabric panels to the back to create the illusion that it’s closed. You may struggle to fit a dress over your body and be left seeing the material bunched up and not lying flat. In the worst cases, you may be asked to hold the dress up to your body and just imagine how the dress might look on you before making a $10,000 purchase.
“This process should—in an ideal world—be joyful, and dressing yourself for this occasion should be something that feels special,” says Alysia Cole, a body-positive bridal stylist who works with many plus-size clients. “Instead, it can so often just hurt your own perception of yourself and bring a lot of your own body issues to the surface. I have a lot of clients who have experiences with eating disorders and told me they thought they were in such a good place—and then they started shopping for dresses. Everything got triggered again.”
As someone who typically wears a size small, I had an easier time trying on wedding dresses than most when preparing for my wedding last fall. Despite that, I still had a difficult time trying on certain sample sizes, where I fully just gave up trying to pull over my hips. I admit I often would leave appointments feeling more conscious of my body than before and strategizing how to tone up ahead of the wedding. But for the average American woman, who is between a size 14 and 16, it’s an even more difficult experience when you’re so limited in sample sizes to try. Just the other day, a friend who is a size six mentioned that a high-end bridal brand could barely accommodate her into their gowns.
Cole does note there is a difference between bridal salons that are considered “luxury” and those that are not. Stores with lower price points, like David’s Bridal, will likely have more options available in all sizes to try on, while a few stores with luxury options, like Kleinfeld, are known for their broader selection. There are also several plus-size specific bridal salons around the country, yet they often don’t carry as many elevated brands. When working with larger brides who want to wear luxury designers, Cole will often take them to one of these stores to actually try something on and see which silhouettes work for them, before going to look at designs that could be more of a style match at luxury salons and showrooms.
“For plus size, the bar is in hell,” Cole says. “Half my job is setting expectations beforehand and making sure that we’re not having that conversation in the store. But those conversations beforehand are jarring. It is a little disheartening, and some people will straight up say they would rather compromise on the style than be put in a situation where they are standing in front of a mirror having something paper-dolled to them. In some cases, they’ve been offered to have their thinner friend who’s with them try on a dress, which is insane. It’s not a luxury experience.”
So why are these sample sizes so limited? A lot of it comes down to the cost of production. Many bridal gowns from luxury designers are couture pieces that are hand-crafted in ateliers requiring hundreds of hours of work, expensive hand-beading, and fabrics imported from across the globe. Before dresses go to market, brands will usually produce one sample of each garment—likely in a runway sample size worn by models in their lookbook—that will be shown to possible vendors. If these bridal salons choose to purchase the style for their store, they would likely only invest in a standard sample size, and possibly one additional larger size, that can best fit their clientele. These purchases will arrive at their salon about six months later. Designers may also choose to send the runway collection out to these stores in advance for trunk shows, giving their clients an option to select a piece ahead of their wider availability, but with a very limited size run to try.
Stylist Sophie Strauss says that while she understands the labor and cost that goes into dress production, it would be more beneficial to increase the standard sample size to benefit both to-be-weds and the bridal industry’s need to turn a profit. “I have worked really closely with a lot of bridal designers who are extremely hard-working people,” says Strauss. “The margins on a lot of this work are not big unless you’re a super big company, so I have so much respect for them. I just think if you’re trying to save money and that’s your argument for not being size inclusive, you should have a much higher floor on the size of samples you'll produce.” She proposes that the standard size should be closer to a 16, which gives more brides the ability to put the garment over their body and be clipped in. “I’m not saying it will be crystal clear exactly how it’s going to fit,” notes Strauss. “But it’s much easier if you can only make one.”
The fact that bridal sample and runway sizes are so small in the luxury space speaks to a broader industry mindset. It’s visible in the last few seasons of bridal fashion week presentations, where there were rarely any curve models on the runway for luxury brands. On the occasions there were, most were likely not much larger than a street-size 12. Strauss questions: “Is it because wealthy people are all thin and taking GLP-1s now, since they can afford them, that the luxury designers don’t think they need to make a larger size? Or, is it because luxury designers overwhelmingly don’t see fat bodies as aesthetically on brand for them and aligned with their vision?” There was a noticeable increase of older models this season—as also seen on the runways of ready-to-wear brands in recent years—but Strauss believes it’s a stand-in for size diversity. “While the representation is lovely, it’s a cop out from a design standpoint because you don’t have to consider a different body frame in order to do that,” she says.
One designer who regularly uses diverse sizing in her marketing and bridal week presentations is Alexandra Grecco. “It has always been very important to us as a brand that our clients are able to see themselves in our pieces, and working exclusively with models who fit into the industry-standard sample size never seemed like the right way to do that,” says Grecco. “For our show, some of the models fit into the samples we created, but for others, we re-made a sample based on their measurements. This approach required extra time, investment, and care, but we wouldn’t have considered a presentation without showing diversity, so we factored all of that puzzle piecing into the plan from the start.”
The brand also offers broader sizing in their New York flagship as well as at the salons they sell to across the globe. “We’ve received so many comments and emails from people who have chosen to wear our brand partly because they feel seen, and I can think of a few conversations I’ve had with brides that touched on this and were very moving,” says the designer. “That made me feel like I must be doing something right.”
Christy Baird, founder of Los Angeles-based luxury retailer Loho Bride, has also made a point to create a welcoming, body-positive space at her popular bridal salon. “At the end of the day, inclusivity in a luxury environment is about ensuring that every bride feels just as worthy of that high-touch, beautiful experience, no matter their size,” explains Baird. The owner says they train their team to speak with inclusive language and aim to always have 20 to 30 styles in stock that are thoughtfully designed with extended sizing in mind. “It’s also essential to us that the designers we partner with demonstrate a true understanding of patterning, fit, and support—not just scaling up a size, but designing intentionally for all body types,” she says.
This practice is important, as multiple bridal stylists noted how dresses created for larger bodies often won’t be properly altered to a realistic body form. Justin Warshaw, CEO and creative director of Justin Alexander, notes that they make sure their luxury Signature brand dresses fit both a size 6 and a size 18 model ahead of market. “We do a full fitting, making sure that the product is grading very well up to an 18—that the right number of bones and the right structure is there, and that everything—including all the lace placement—is thought out,” says Warshaw, who just showed his new collection at Barcelona Bridal Fashion Week. “It's not common in this industry, because it’s honestly a big investment.”
Cole iterates that this investment in larger samples at market is very rare, and leads to a “snake eating its own tail” cycle in the industry. “What happens when the designers don’t have anything is that the boutiques won’t see anything on curve models. So then there are more risks involved for boutiques to purchase something in a larger sample, because they don't know how it’s going to scale up,” she explains. “When more boutiques are not purchasing anything in plus size, that trickles down to the actual client, who is probably not going to buy anything that they can’t try on. That informs all of the sales numbers. At the end of this cycle, people are probably making their designs or choosing their pulls based off of those sales numbers.” In short: “It is not set up for anyone to be size inclusive,” she says.
“From my perspective, it’s an area that absolutely needs continued attention,” remarks Baird. “Every bride deserves to feel represented in the luxury space, and it shouldn’t feel like inclusivity is an afterthought.”
