Choosing Bridesmaids and Ushers and Outfits

For me, choosing bridesmaids was very easy. I have moved around quite a bit during my life so there were four people who stood out very clearly as those who had been good enough friends to remain in contact with me after I had moved on. Two were friends from school and sixth form, one of whom also went to university with me. The other two were colleagues from two different jobs I had had since graduating. I felt that four was a reasonable number and had no reason to try and choose between them.


Choosing ushers was another matter altogether. James had always known that his best man would be his brother but beyond that he had no idea. What made things worse was that he refused to think about it until November (six months after we got engaged!). When he finally started to consider the issue he realised that there were five people he really felt deserved the role and no amount of pondering was going to make him choose between them, even though we both felt that six groomsmen was a little over the top.

We had an added problem that two ushers now live in San Francisco (along with James), one lives in Finland and the best man lives in Holland. Even the remaining two don't live in the same part of England so suit fittings were potentially going to be a problem. In the end we decided on hiring suits for James, both our Dads, the best man and one chief usher and agreeing on an outfit the rest could provide themselves. The suits we hired (from Moss Bros) were grey so we decided that the ushers could wear their own grey suit (of any shade) along with black shoes and a white shirt and then we would provide a cravat to match the others. Sadly Moss didn't have any waistcoats or cravats in a blue to fit the colour scheme so we had to hire those separately from Young's which did cost us slightly more.

The bridesmaids dresses were less of a problem. Once I had the blue colour scheme in mind I had my eye out for blue dresses everywhere I went. I liked the look of many dresses  from online companies who will provide them in any colour but all the ones I liked best turned out to be the more expensive ones. Eventually I found exactly what I was looking for in the Monsoon sale (reduced to 45 from 150!). I bought four in sizes I guessed at after checking I could return them if they turned out to be the wrong size. Getting the bridesmaids to try them on was tricky as even they live in different parts of England but a few weeks later and a couple of phonecalls and trips to several monsoon stores and I was in possession of four correctly-sized dresses. Unfortunately I also had two incorrectly-sized dresses and was told I could only exchange them. Its never that hard to find pretty things to buy in Monsoon though so that wasn't a problem for long.