This month we're excited to be featuring wedding & event stylist Meagan Berkhout from The Style Pallette co sharing her advice on how to choose your wedding dress to match your theme.
I tend to find that most girls have dreamt of their wedding day and have a fairly good idea of their own personal style. My role as the stylist is to pinpoint their style, develop and refine it, and then ultimately apply it to their wedding day so that every aspect is consistent and tells their story.
When asked 'what style do you have in mind for your wedding day?' most go straight to describing the décor they want on the tables or certain colours they want in the flowers. However, style extends so much further than just the material elements at a wedding so I am always rephrasing this question ;)
When I first meet with a bride, my aim is to understand who they are and the things they might find beautiful.
Style, in essence, is the feeling or a mood that a bride may want to emulate for their day. When we understand this, it then provides us the foundation to develop everything else.
Knowing the mood we wish to set can then help us to pick the right venue, choose the right type of stationery, determine the music that will be played, materials and textures used throughout and even certain colours will render different feelings.
Every element chosen, including THE wedding dress!, plays a vital part in promoting the feelings that will ultimately enhance the story we want to tell.
As a bride, you generally have pictured your wedding day in a certain landscape or your heart will gravitate to a country setting, or beach, or mountains, vineyards, city etc.
Therefore, I would suggest a good place to start when picking the right dress to suit the overall style, is to collect all the feelings you have in relation to your chosen landscape.
For example: When I consider a beach setting, the thoughts that come to mind involve soft sand, angelic windswept hair, lapping waves, a sense of space and warm kisses of sunshine!
If we were to transfer all these thoughts and feelings in to a dress, then what might it look like?
Soft, angelic, floating silk comes to mind ~ such as a dress that catches in the wind and rolls like the waves would be beautiful in a beach setting.
I would also associate short sleeves, spaghetti straps or a dress with sheer or minimal coverage in a beach landscape. Long sleeves would feel somewhat disconnected for me {although, we should all wear long sleeves to the beach to be good to our skin!!}.
So when it comes to finding 'the' dress, consider this approach when you are looking!
You want the dress to add to the story, make sense in your chosen landscape or setting, and fit in well with the overall style vision which will always be a reflection of your own personal style and what you find beautiful."
— Meagan
Meagan Berkhout is from The Style Pallette co a boutique styling business based in Sydney, Australia.
By Ingrid Szajer
Lindsey