Why are wedding dresses so expensive?

[Celaena]

I'm watching daytime TV and 'say yes to the dress' and they're trying on dresses that cost thousands? And I can't tell why that dress costs 7000 and that one 'only' 3000?

It's crazy

Buy cheap look cheap. Wouldn’t say it’s the dress to be skimping on.

I hired mine for £75.00!!!

@confusedat23

I got a £3000 wedding dress for £700 it was a couture dress which was only worn once for a runway show!

They don't have to be expensive if you don't want them to be

£700 is still very expensive...

@Youbigdosser

Buy cheap look cheap. Wouldn’t say it’s the dress to be skimping on.

There is a large margin between looking cheap and costing thousands, come on.

Just bought mine for £2.3k. I baulked at the price but loved it.

Apparently the amount of beadwork on the one I have chosen takes 1 person 7 weeks.

If you remove the cut the shop will take, then the cut the supplier will take, it doesn’t actually leave enough money to pay 1 person’s wages for 7 weeks, let alone the price of materials so I’m actually a little baffled at why it doesn’t cost more!

They don't have to be, mine was around £700, I picked it out and fell in love with it before I even knew how much it was

And yes, I checked that they are not made in a sweatshop in China! The seamstresses are in London.

I bought the sample. It was £2,500 and I bought it for £800, I did prefer another one but as a born worrier I wanted to make sure my dress had ‘arrived‘ and was worried about ordering it in.if I bought the one I Slightly preferred it was £3k and then o wanted to add shoulder straps as I hate strapless things do alterations would cost a bomb. I couldn’t justify the cost not even for me wedding dress.

@toconclude
I didn’t say anything about spending thousands but if your going to spend minimum amount don’t expect it to look like an expensive dress that hours of work go into. You get one wedding so why would you spend the same amount you’d spend on a normal dress.

Mine was 3k handmade by a specialist couture corsetiere. It was so beautiful I cried when I saw it. Marriage didn't last, but that dress will!

I got mine for £250 from the sister shop for a fancy wedding dress place which is where they send their older stuff. It was originally about 1000. One issue is that they will be the dresses people have tried on so it needs washing as well as altering, and limited choices in size. I had 6 weeks to plan my wedding so I needed something fast. Most dresses were in a size 12 which would have been just a bit too big to look good altered down, so I had very limited choice. Luckily, the one I liked the most was one of the smaller ones.#

I did go to a few other wedding dress shops which sell cheaper ones and are widely recommended online, but these were sometimes made just for those shops and it showed. The material/embellishments and cuts were nowhere near as nice, but they were around the same price.

£250 was still a lot to pay for something you will only wear once, especially when you factor in all the alterations I had done.

@lisaanderson6307 interesting that your first post on mumsnet is to drag up a 3 year old thread to advertise

They don,t have to be, look at stuff in the sale. Last years designs, Preloved, Vitage shops and charity shops, friends and family,s. Mine was in the sale and needde adaptions and was still less then £200.

It's called the Wedding Tax.

Adam Ruins Everything has an interesting video on this. The moment a business hears the word "wedding" they mark up their prices to ridiculous heights, because of the culture surrounding the wedding industrial complex.

[quote Youbigdosser]@toconclude
I didn’t say anything about spending thousands but if your going to spend minimum amount don’t expect it to look like an expensive dress that hours of work go into. You get one wedding so why would you spend the same amount you’d spend on a normal dress.[/quote]
OP was talking about thousands, though. It really depends what you want, I bought off the peg non-meringue because that's what I wanted and it was perfect. Perfectly good quality and not extravagant cost.

I nearly fainted at spending £500 on a wedding dress !

But like pp have said the word ‘wedding’ magically increases the price