There is a bridal store in NYC that women all over the country know, regardless of their marital status.  Anyone who’s had a guilty-pleasure binge of the reality show Say Yes to the Dress feels like they’ve been inside Kleinfeld Bridal. On a snowy Friday evening, my bestie Miranda and I stepped inside the actual boutique.

Miranda has never seen Say Yes to the Dress, but she’s getting married in July and needs to say yes to one real soon. In fact, pretty much the minute we stepped in Kleinfeld, she was berated for waiting “so long” to get a dress.

Excuse me, not a dress, THE Dress.

I’ve watched enough friends get married now to  know the world of weddings is bonkers. Still, it was something else to experience it intimately, as Miranda’s right hand woman. 

Did you know it’s a huge, laborious process to try on a wedding dress? One that involves being escorted into dresses by a sales person? I guess it’s a right of passage for soon-to-be-brides: being almost totally naked in front of a total stranger. “We do this all day,” said our sales person, “Just think of it like the doctor’s office.”

It took us a while to get on the right dress track. “All the dresses so far have kinda screamed, ‘I’m getting married! LOOK AT MY TITS!'”

“So you’re conservative?” Asked the sales person.

Miranda and I exchanged a look of horror. We both grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where there’s no greater insult than being labeled CONSERVATIVE. HEAVEN FORBID.

Not wanting everyone at your wedding to stare at your boobs is conservative in 2018?! What happened to CLASSY, Kleinfeld!?

From what we saw, the trend seems to be more “cupcake”.

This was soooo not Miranda’s scene. Nor mine. She had no entourage, no five-figure budget, no “I’ve been dreaming of my wedding day since I was a little girl!” We were riff-raff at Kleinfeld. But it was a certainly an interesting experience! Even a helpful one for Miranda. She now knows what kind of style she’s looking for.

She did find a gorgeous dress. Which only costs about half the entire budget of her wedding. But we knew going into Kleinfeld that there would be no saying yes…dresses at Kleinfeld cost between 5,000 and 60,000 dollars. Hey, if you can say yes to a dress and not simultaneously mountain of credit card debt, that’s great! Go for it!

I couldn’t help but wonder…how many women leave Kleinfeld talking about how ridiculous the wedding industry is? Miranda and I left to sit in a bar, drink cheap beers and scheme ways to find beautiful dresses… that aren’t labeled “bridal”…

Anyone have wedding dress shopping tips? Stories about how spending the money is worth it? Confessions of epic Say Yes To The Dress binges?