Two years ago I’d have told you gold bridesmaid dresses were a metallic cry for help, the kind of thing a bride picks when she’s decided her whole wedding needs to look like a New Year’s Eve party at 2pm in a barn. I was firmly against them. Then I stood in three of them for three different friends’ weddings inside eighteen months, and my opinion did that slow, embarrassing thing where it just quietly flips while you’re not looking, and now I own one I paid actual money for and would defend at a dinner party.
The wind is the first thing nobody warns you about. Gold fabric with any shine to it catches light in a way that’s gorgeous for photos and genuinely hazardous the second there’s a breeze, because now you’re not just holding a dress down, you’re holding down something that flashes like a bike reflector every time it moves. I did this outside a barn venue in Sonoma for a solid twenty minutes before the ceremony, one hand on my dress, one hand shading my eyes from my own dress.
Stairs are worse. There’s a satin one in my closet that I love in every situation except stairs, where it turns into a hazard because the shine makes it slippery to the eye even when the fabric itself is fine, you just can’t tell where the fold ends and the step begins.
You Might Also Like
Cost me four dollars at my usual Tuesday restock and I still wear it, but I go down stairs like I’m eighty.
The walk from the car is where you find out if you actually like the dress or just liked it in the fitting room. Gold shows everything, gravel dust, a splash from a puddle, the chalky residue of a parking lot, all of it sits right there on the surface reflecting light at everyone. My coworker, who has opinions about resale value that I mostly ignore, wore a gold slip dress to a fall wedding and spent the reception looking like she’d been dipped.
Half the argument on our end is whether gold works in daylight at all or if it’s strictly a golden hour, string lights, nighttime reception color. I think a matte or brushed gold does fine at 2pm, all that shine calmed down into something more like a tan with ambition. The high shine satin one, though, that’s a gamble dress, gorgeous under any kind of artificial light, a lot in a church at noon, and I’d tell a friend that straight instead of pretending every gold dress suits every ceremony.
Buy number two in my good column this year, if you’re keeping score like I am, and worth every cent of the forty one dollars I spent once I did the math on three weddings’ worth of wear.
