Wedding Guest Dress Found!

Polish wedding attire

Trigger Warning: Post almost entirely about women's apparel.

“We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality,” said Oscar Wilde, who was wicked but nevertheless would have been fun to go shopping with. 

That said, I am not so sure finding a nice dress for Polish Pretend Son's wedding is so trivial anyway. 

First of all, I have only one Polish Pretend Son (so far). Second, there will be photographs. Third, Poles are very blunt, so there is always the danger that some other wedding guest might say "Who is that frightfully frumpy lady?", meaning me, and in my anguish I will once again forget how to speak Polish. 

So as devoted readers know, I have been popping in and out of Edinburgh shops looking for a splendid wedding guest dress. Until today I had only got as far as buying a navy blue Jacques Vert hat on sale. In the UK, Jacques Vert is the tried-and-true label for the aunts-mothers-and-grandmothers set, but his line-up this spring does not thrill me. There is also the problem of British women's wedding clothes looking a bit odd on the Continent. If you've ever happened upon an English destination wedding in an Italian church, you may know what I mean. 

That said, Polish Pretend Son and his Narzeczona are romantic about the UK--or Poland's glorious, hat-wearing, pre-Communist past--so the N. has asked her female friends to wear hats, and I snapped up the JV number. The £ to $ calculation would have made my frugal mother and grandmother (great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother et alia) blink, but I inwardly argued that the hat was large, tipped at a jaunty angle, and half-price. Also, I told my roiling Scottish-Canadian conscience, it is navy blue, and therefore highly practical, as navy is basically a neutral, my dear.  

Its purchase meant that I would have to find a dress to go with it, which was a worry because the shops are full of on-sale navy blue shift dresses and white dresses with navy blue large floral prints, and the wedding is in June. Does one want to wear a navy shift dress (or large floral prints) to a June wedding in rural Poland? No, one does not.

To improve my chances of finding something more exciting, I went to the charity and consignment shops of Morningside. Alas, I found nothing. I also looked online (and thank you to Alias Clio for suggestions) and scrolled through images of bright bohemian maxi-dresses. They did not suit. This morning Benedict Ambrose and I went to a very modish ladies' tailor shop and examined an azure tweed suit. Although value for money (£500, cough), it was totally inappropriate for a Polish wedding.

But then B.A. and I went to that Mecca of high-end charity shops, Stockbridge, and BEHOLD, we found a delightfully embroidered pale blue gown at the Red Cross emporium. As a denouement, we also found a beaded midnight-blue-lace-over-"nude"-slip shift dress at Oxfam. It was only £15, and B.A. said I ought to get it, so we went back to the Historical Shelter with two wedding dresses.

To my surprise, the navy JV hat goes better with the pale blue gown than with the midnight blue lace, so the pale blue gown wins. I will wear the midnight blue to the second, non-hat, Polish wedding I'm attending in June.

B.A. will be wearing a kilt to PPS's wedding. My sartorial drama is over, but B.A.'s continues because he has only a Prince Charlie jacket for the evening and still needs a jacket for the day wedding. B.A. has literally skipped a wedding ceremony because he does not own a day jacket. (Wearing an evening jacket before 4 PM is apparently akin to stabbing your own mother and dancing on her corpse.)  But he is not allowed to skip Polish Pretend Son's wedding ceremony, and so the hunt is on.