Bridal lingerie is to a wedding dress what a canvas is to an oil painting – the base upon which a thing of beauty is created.
It is always important to wear well-fitting lingerie if you want your outerwear to hang properly and look your best. But on your wedding day, when you will be the centre of attention in your beautiful, dreamy and probably very expensive dress, it’s essential to get it right with what you’re wearing underneath.
Typically, a bride will need a strapless bra or bustier providing support and uplift. But what the bride needs and wants are often two different things. She sees herself in a pretty, lacy, perhaps beribboned garment while her dress fitter is insisting on a smooth, unfussy garment with no lumps or bumps that will show through the dress - in other words, something purely functional.This is where trained bra fitters come in.
They will start by establishing the correct size. Too small a bra, and bulges will appear in all the wrong places. Too large, and the bra won’t provide enough support.The next step is to help the bride find the balance between practicality and ascetics. If the dress is made of a heavy fabric, the bride might well be able to get away with a pretty boned corset trimmed with lace, with a pull-in lace up back. If it’s made of thin, silky, unforgiving fabric, she will probably need to go for an absolutely plain bra or bustier.Princess line corsets – which mare made with vertical wire but no underwire – are ideal for achieving push-up for larger busted ladies, while silicone pads are available for women with smaller busts who want to maximise their assets.
Made to measure corsets are popular with brides with the money to spare - they normally cost £200 up - as these give a four inch pull in, creating a fantastic hourglass figure. When ordering one, your over-bust, under-bust, waist and hip measurements are taken together with your height, bra size and dress size. This ensures a perfect fit.These corsets, which normally take four to six weeks to make, can be dyed another colour after the wedding and worn as glorious tops teamed with skirts and trousers, or even dressed down with jeans
An increasing number of brides sidestep the issue of buying bridal lingerie by having a made to measure corset made in ivory or white silk, then getting their dressmaker simply to make the skirt in a style of their choice to form the wedding dress.“Most brides end up with a slightly more functional corset than they planned initially, for reasons of practicality, but there are still some very pretty options at the plainer end of the spectrum,” said owner of Aphrodisia, Ghislaine Hubbard.“What they can then do is compensate by treating themselves to some really pretty silk or lace lingerie and nightwear for the honeymoon!”
All the bestGilly Hubbard