As hard as it is to find fashionable petite dresses for women, it is even harder to find petite dresses for some of the most important special occasions of your life – namely your high school prom and then your wedding. Even though it is a little easier to find petite dresses for prom since the dress designers are only working with a 14-18 age demographic, the petite wedding dress market is a completely different story. For those wedding dress designers out there, there are a WHOLE LOT of women who are under the height of 5 foot 4 inches tall that would really appreciate some wedding dresses designed specifically for them instead of having to pay to lob off major portions of beautiful fabric in order for the dress to fit even remotely close to what it was designed to look like!
Also, the term “petite” does not simply mean make different versions of your designs for “skinny” people, but it means that most petite women are simply shorter than what the designers apparently think they are!
All that being said, you do have a few options if you are looking for a petite wedding dress:
1. The first and most obvious option is to find a designer to create a completely custom wedding dress for you. Even though they could likely work with existing designs, chances are it will take a lot longer and will be a lot more expensive than finding an already made wedding dress. However, this is your best bet to ensuring the dress will look exactly how the designer envisioned it and exactly how you want it to look.
2. The second option is to shop at your everyday wedding dress boutique and hope that you can either get lucky and find a dress that already fits you or find one that will not take too many alterations at the expense of sacrificing the beauty of the core of the design to make it fit. This is likely the option that most brides-to-be take since they do not know any better. I’m not blaming anybody for taking this route but I am just warning all of those newly engaged petite women that this option is often very discouraging since you spend so much time looking at and falling in love with dresses that won’t fit you, even with a ton of alterations. So this option takes a long time and may be expensive for lots of alterations, but it’s certainly the more reasonable option as opposed to getting one completely custom.
3. The third and most ideal option is if you somehow live near a women’s clothing or even better, wedding dress boutique that specializes in petite clothing! We all know these are quite rare, even in some of the most heavily populated metropolitan areas. There really aren’t too many “good” websites out there yet that specialize in trendy and fashionable wedding dresses for petite women (which we hope to change soon on our site!), so your best bet is to be lucky enough, or be willing to travel long distances, to visit an actual brick-and-mortar petite wedding dress boutique!
Feel free to comment with any tips about finding petite wedding dresses or any other dresses for any other special occasion!
