My wedding dress(es)

The ferry is sliding smoothly through the water. Isabel sleeps in her snow-white pram that will turn dirty yellow to the end of our trip. She wears an unbearably cute white dotted dress with lace. I bought it during our first mother-daughter shopping. I showed her the dress and asked if she liked it. Of course, she didn’t give a shit, but I wanted to develop a habit of asking her opinion nevertheless.

Her dress fits my wedding dress very well.

My wedding dress is not really a wedding dress. I didn’t plan to buy any special dress, because I didn’t want to waste money. Wedding dresses are always expensive — I will come to the topic later. Initially, I thought we will just wear something nice, smart, as you say. But eventually, we both ended up buying special clothes.

I found my dress during the same mother-daughter shopping with Isabel. In the shop, there was only one dress like this, and I fell in love with it immediately. The dress is very long, white with little black stars, long sleeves, and high collar. It is a mix of the 19th-century romanticism and gypsy freedom. It was a huge luck because this only dress was exactly my size, and I gasped when I saw myself in the mirror when I tried it on. I asked Isabel if she thought I looked beautiful. I guess she said yes.

The dress cost 25 EUR, which perfectly fitted into my modest budget.

When I tried it again at home and proudly sent photos to my mum and friends, I remembered the story of how I bought my first wedding dress. This story deserves to be told.

In June 2015 I spent a month in Lviv, Ukraine.

I lived in an old building, in the apartment with the squeakiest floor you can imagine. Next to the entrance, there were hangers made out of real hoofs, and that was creepy. Above my bed there hung a cheap image of Virgin Mary with angels, and it changed when you moved it. I forgot how it’s called, but everyone had pictures like this as a child.

I shared the apartment with four amazing women from Poland, but if I start telling stories about them, I will never come to the wedding dress. So, next time.

I had a plan to buy a wedding dress in Lviv. Not an obvious idea, you think. But I remembered that Lviv was full of wedding salons. On every corner there stood a mannequin wearing a wedding dress. Some mannequins were chained so they could not be stolen. Some dresses became yellow because of the street dust and sun rays.

I thought that Lviv was the perfect place to buy a wedding dress because I thought that wedding dresses were cheap there. Because, after all, everything was cheap in Lviv. You could buy a handmade, beautiful vyshivanka for 30 EUR, for example. And you could have a royal dinner for 15.

That month I attended a summer school on the multicultural history. Every morning we had Yiddish classes. I was exempted from them because they were for beginners, and I already spoke Yiddish quite well. So when my friends were going to the morning lessons, I had all the time for myself. I decided to use this time to explore the wedding salons.

I went to the nearest one, and the visit caused me a minor trauma.

When you hear the words “a wedding salon” you imagine a luxurious space with a plush sofa where a polite slim fairy offers you a glass of champagne and assists you in exploring different dresses.

And here is how a typical wedding salon in Lviv looks like.

It is a regular apartment in a regular building. Meaning that the owner probably sleeps in the back room. In the living room you see cheap Soviet wardrobes, open and stuck with dresses packed in plastic bags. When I entered, the woman who worked there gave me an unfriendly look. Probably because I didn’t have a bright makeup, I was not tanned, and I didn’t have long shiny dyed hair. In other words — I didn’t look like a bride who could afford anything there. Maybe she even thought that I wasn’t a bride at all, but a loony woman obsessed with the idea of getting married, who comes to wedding salons just to try on dresses.

The woman was obviously irritated by my visit. I was confused and felt awkward. She was impatient, and I didn’t even have an option to look at the dresses properly because she asked me immediately which one I wanted to try on. Nervous and uncomfortable, I pointed timidly to a random dress. She ordered me to stand on a round platform in the middle of the room and put the dress on me, right on the clothes I was wearing (a second-hand summer dress).

The wedding dress looked horrible. It was heavy, bulky, all synthetic, and hopelessly, desperately provincial. A typical “cake” — this is how we (people with at least a minimal taste) call this type of wedding dresses because they are always so big, covered with laces, bands, bows, crystals, and it is absolutely impossible to pee in it — you would need a companion who would hold the skirt with a long tail. I used to laugh at brides wearing the “cakes”.

The woman waited impatiently, her arms crossed on her chest. I asked, feeling like a schoolgirl: How much does it cost? Not that I thought about buying it of course, I just wanted to understand the prices.

300 USD, she answered. I guess the expression on my face spoke for itself and confirmed her first thought — this girl has no money whatsoever.

God knows I had the money. But I didn’t expect that in Lviv there are people who can pay this money for a dress, especially if it is an ugly and tasteless dress. In Lviv, if you work in a university, for example, your monthly salary is below 200 EUR.

I was naïve and didn’t get the context. Yes, people in Lviv are poor, as in most places in Ukraine. But weddings! Weddings are sacred. A wedding is the most important highlight of your life. And people are ready to pay for the “dream wedding.” How do they do this? If they don’t have their own money they take credit for a wedding in a bank. Yes, I am not kidding, it is really a thing. You can take a credit for a wedding, with painful, predatory interest. Also in Russia. With the money you pay for a luxurious venue with fake gold on fake marble columns, for food, for alcohol (vodka, “champagne”, and wine), for a shitty cover band, and of course for a dress. Usually, a couple hopes that the guests will gift enough money so they can return the credit fast, but I doubt it ever happens. The family life starts with a huge debt. There are many things that my mind cannot grasp, and taking credit for a wedding is one of them.

Now, considering the context, it is no surprise that a wedding dress in a second-rate shop costs 300 USD. There are also expensive wedding salons where you can give a thousand or two for a dress.

Thus, I realized that my plan was doomed. There was no point in looking for a dress in Lviv because it was not cheap and because I would get mad visiting all the salons and looking for something not-so-ugly.

I was nervous, frustrated, and panicking. Because the truth was that I was not much different from the girls who buy “cakes” and take credits for weddings. I also believed that a wedding is sacred, and special, and happens just once in a lifetime, and I needed a proper dress. Back then, the idea of getting married seemed to be the peak of my life, my greatest achievement, a fairy-tale came true. I had to be dressed accordingly.

I came to lectures grey-faced and completely devastated. I couldn’t concentrate on what a professor was saying and googled wedding shops. I was overwhelmed by all the websites as if all the bulky dresses of the world fell on me and I suffocated under the pressure of white material.

But the salvation came quickly. A friend of mine recommended me to check the website etsy.com. There in no time I found a shop with vintage wedding dresses. Then I saw it, my perfect dress, an authentic dress from the 50s. Miraculously it was on sale and cost something like 50 USD. I ordered it to my address in Moscow. I remember that I paid more for the delivery than for the dress itself, but altogether it was around 110 USD, so it was alright.

When I arrived in Moscow I tried it on. The dress was amazing, ivory, atlas, with elegant embroidery, and cute little buttons on the sleeves. There was just one tiny problem. It was too small for me. Way too small. So small that I could not close the zipper.

So I had to lose weight.

Back then I knew nothing about healthy nutrition and how one should really lose weight. I turned to extreme diets. In particular to a buckwheat diet. From the name you can guess that it is a very Russian thing. You have to eat only buckwheat for a week. And you cannot cook it, you pour boiling water on buckwheat and leave it for a night. Then you eat it as much as you want, and nothing but it. You can only eat an apple or drink kefir in addition to buckwheat.

I did the buckwheat diet several times in a few months, and also during three last days before the wedding. Basically I tortured myself, and on the last evening I almost fainted from exhaustion. I was pale and weak. But my sufferings were not in vain. The dress fitted perfectly.

Holy shit, I looked like a princess. With professional make-up and hairstyle, and manicure, and an elegant bride bouquet.

The photos from the wedding were just fabulous.

But at the party I drank too much alcohol to be able to suck in my guts, so I changed into something simple.

After the wedding my parents took the dress back to Moscow. The tail was dirty, the lining tore in several spots. I had no idea what to do with it because however beautiful it still was, nobody would buy a dress in this condition.

So it is still there. In some dusty plastic bag in my old room, too beautiful to be thrown away and too destroyed to be kept.

This is more or less the whole story.

The ferry is approaching the port of Soby. It is early morning, the gentle sunlight shines over the sea. I enjoy the feeling of the dress on my body. It cuddles my enormous milky breast and my soft belly that contained Isabel just a few months ago. Light, casual, and beautiful. I didn’t have to change a single bit in my body for this dress.

I didn’t have to change at all.