Weekend Wedding Planning: Bridesmaids Dresses

Since I'm having an destination wedding (at least it's a destination for my side of the guest list!) I decided to let my bridesmaids pick their own dresses and shoes. I'm giving them pointers about the style I prefer and showing them a few of my favorites, but since they already have to purchase a plane ticket to come to the wedding it seemed excessive to pick an expensive dress they'd only wear once as well! Their guidelines are: navy, flowy/romantic, and mid-range hemlines. Navy is one of our wedding colors and it's such a versatile color I'm confident they can pick dresses they'll wear again. My favorite is this simple, silk chiffon dress by J Crew.
Fun fact: ironically when I was in high school one of my classes required us to plan our own weddings and learn a lot about wedding traditions much of this information I have retained. I remember my teacher was quite firm in the fact that all bridesmaids should be maids; i.e. unmarried women because they were to represent our unmarried lives, which were coming to an end. More fun facts: bridesmaids were originally a sort of bridal infantry. In early Roman times they were supposed to help intervene with wayward thugs or vengeful suitors. But dressing bridesmaids nearly identical to the bride persists in other cultures and times as well--they made it intentionally difficult to identify the bride so evil spirits or ill-wishers wouldn't know who to curse! It's interesting how we keep the tradition of having bridesmaids when much of our reasons for having them has changed. And I definitely haven't been to any weddings recently where I couldn't tell who was the bride. 

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