The Psycho Obsessive Bride.

You can guarantee on the rare occasion you decide to take a day off the answer phone and email fills to capacity. Most messages are from our psycho obsessive brides wanting to check if they can wear a 2” heel with their dress. Other pressing and very important questions are what underwear should I wear with my dress? normal and quite sensible questions you say? well yes but not really so urgent about twelve months before the wedding! Can you image I call a top London designer who is dealing with maybe 200 dresses to ask which pair of knickers Miss C should wear with her dress.

These ladies also ring us about six months before their wedding date asking us to contact the designer to find out how their dress is doing? I tend not to ring the Designer to ask as they would probably reply “its over there in that roll of uncut fabric”. So sometimes we have to use our initiative to avoid POB going "off on one". “Oh I was just speaking to the designer about your dress” is a good one or “she is working on it as we speak” usually covers it.

When a bride orders her dress twelve months before the wedding and we smile and gush as she leaves the shop advising that we will look forward to seeing her soon. We usually, however, expect the “soon” to be when the dress arrives and not two days later. Some Brides call us every bloody week from “can I just check my fabric again” to “can I bring my underwear to check it for colour match”.

So we try to get the dresses in two months before the wedding. Eight weeks, you would think, would be long enough for even a Royal Wedding arranged in monstrous proportions? Well no in fact its not and many brides call us three weeks before this screaming at us where is her dress. When we reply it will be here in three weeks they claim that it is simply not enough time. So we receive three to four calls a week from the bride from hell until the deadline arrives along with the dress on time as usual. The bride upon hearing this wonderful news responds “about bloody time” then states "she is far too busy to come this week but there is no rush is there" and "can she have an appointment at 7pm because she has taken all her leave allowance for the honeymoon" or "I can't make it to the shop do you offer home fittings?". And where does this bride live in location to the shop? California? Siberia? No two minutes walk away not even a car journey.

We then spend the next seven weeks up to collection on the phone discussing veil colours and tiara heights. Can I also point out at this point that an ivory dress is ivory so do you really need a swatch of fabric to match up your flowers! And if it’s a white dress I suggest white flowers even without seeing the swatch of fabric would probably be the best way to go. I know attention to detail is all-important but I am pretty sure if your fabric is not quite the same shade as the roses there is not a bloody thing either of us can do about it unless you are the Queen in "Alice in Wonderland" and demand that the roses are painted!

The psycho obsessive bride worries about all eventualities all possible things that could go wrong are taken into account and possible solutions are noted. Hours are spent replying to answer phone messages

1) “what if the bridesmaid stands on the train or veil?” I would love my answer to be "kill the bloody big footed bridesmaid".

2) “What if it rains on the day” oh I will just ring God and tell him to defer that to Sunday it won't be a problem.

3)“How will I dance in the dress?” I don’t bloody care sod off.

They resemble a nervous wreck by collection of the dress and doubt they will remember any of the actual day let alone enjoy it. Why do we put ourselves through so much stress!