No matter who you are, the bride’s wedding dress is going to make a big dent in your budget and as many a man has discovered, whether he be the bride’s father or the groom who are paying for it, they end up being highly perplexed that a dress which is only to be worn once can cost so much money. When you are dealing with cost issues in your wedding, it may help you to consider that these items, and the wedding dress ranks very high up there with them, are not so much about “cost” as about the value they give – the look and feeling they give to the bride, the groom and the assembled cast who are participating in the wedding.
As the credit card advert says, “Priceless!”
From the humble wedding to the sublime or ridiculous, you can take your pick; we have the wedding dresses where money is clearly no object and nothing has been spared for delivering the ultimate creation.
The most expensive wedding dress in the world to date is the USD $12 million creation, known as The Diamond Wedding Gown, which was the result of a collaboration between Renee Strauss (owner of a super successful, wedding salon in Beverley Hills) and Martin Katz, a rare jewel dealer. The dress itself uses over 150 carats of diamonds and to give you an idea of what this means, the typical engagement ring rarely hits a full carat and hovers around the half-carat mark.
The Diamond Wedding Gown was premiered in 2008 and took the title of the most expensive wedding dress in the world from a design by Yumi Katsura of Japan. Her creation followed the same traditional white design as The Diamond Wedding Gown, but came in at a paltry USD $8.5 million though it does lay claim to containing over 1,000 pearls and one of only two 5 carat white gold diamonds in the world.
Coming down to the mid-range in terms of expense, we have the Peacock Feather Wedding Dress which was launched in 2009 and contains 2009 peacock feathers to commemorate the year. For a miserly USD $1.5 million you can have the ultimate in mating display for your wedding day and for the non-traditionalists, it isn’t white. One word of caution here, with a display of male peacock feathers of such grandeur, you should not be so surprised to find the bride being trailed by a long line of brown hens!
We have to take all of these dollar values with a pinch of salt given the recent economic wrangling; Vera Wang who is the wedding dress designer to the stars and claimed the most expensive dress she’s ever made was the unused wedding dress for the J-Lo/Affleck marriage that never was, is now selling her wedding dresses at a 50% discount compared to last year.
Finally, there is a chance for all of us to get into something, expensively uncomfortable, and then hang it in the closet for the rest of our lives!
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