Congratulations on your engagement!

Or on the engagement of your daughter, sibling, or friend.

Now your head (or their head) has started turning and churning and really thinking about all of the logistics you didn’t even realize you needed to sort out for your wedding!

Especially everything that is involved with finding and perfecting the wedding gown or suit of your dreams. 

Turns out buying your wedding attire is the most complicated clothing purchase you've had to date!

Well, as a tailor and alterations shop, we have gathered a lot of experience helping couples in Cedar Rapids be aisle-ready over our 30+ years. So today we’re going to start with the first question you might be faced with when planning your wedding attire – how much time do you need to put together your wedding wardrobe? Finding, ordering, and altering.

Engagements traditionally tend to be pretty long, lasting a year, two years, or more. People assume this is largely due to the wedding venue. They get booked out well in advance, right? Yes, that’s true! But as it turns out, many parts of the wedding planning process need just as much time, and that includes what you’re going to wear.

Hate the idea of waiting a year or longer to walk down the aisle? Does that mean you’re doomed to settle for less than your dream dress or exceptional suit? Not at all!

There are three areas that impact your wedding apparel timeline: finding the dress/suit, ordering lead time, and alterations. There is some room to fiddle and tweak each of these parts if you need to shorten that timeline, and we’ll touch on each of them. Then with your own preferences and priorities you will have a clear picture of how your wedding wardrobe and alterations plays into your overall wedding timeline.

Assembling the Ensemble:

First thing’s first -  you need to get an idea of what you want to wear. The hunt is a lot easier when you know what you’re looking for!

Plenty of wedding blogs and books and binders talk about this part, so we’ll just summarize some top-level tips here.

1. Browse inspiration before going shopping

Take a look at online shopping sites or even try a style quiz to start getting some ideas. Pinterest is of course a very popular tool to collect and organize different inspiration and specific styles you might like to try. Keep in mind different kinds of fabrics, especially if you’re going for a suit. The fabric of your suit can make a world of difference in fit, comfort, and style. If you’re having an outdoor Iowa wedding in July, you probably want to lean away from wool and into linen. For wedding gowns, the popular options you’ll see while shopping are satin, sateen, chiffon, taffeta, and even velvet.

2. Make a shopping plan

While still in the research phase, search out all of the various shopping locales in your area. There are, of course, dedicated boutiques for wedding dresses and wedding apparel, most of which require an appointment, so be sure to request one before dropping by! But also don’t dismiss more general clothing stores if you’re looking for something more casual, unique, or budget-conscious. Are you interested in something vintage? Then look for vintage shops and second-hand clothing, maybe even ones that specialize in formal wear. If you are keeping to a specific budget, many wedding boutiques include the price range of their dresses on their website so you know what to expect before including them on your list.

3. Try on your ideas & keep an open mind

Now that you have an idea of different styles and fabrics you might like and your list of shops, time to try stuff on! And while your inspiration list gives you a great place to start, do keep an open mind here. The style you fall in love with may not have actually made it on your ist! (Story of my sister! You never know 😉)

How long it takes to assemble your dream ensemble of course depends on the person. I am a particularly indecisive person, so I would take a bit longer browsing all the different wedding styles online, and would make many appointments at many shops. But if you already have a pretty clear idea in mind, then you’ll be super quick and ready to hit the shops!

If you are going to be shopping at a specialty wedding boutique, these shops aren’t always able to accommodate a last-minute appointment. So if you’re including them in your shopping plan, calculate 2-4 weeks to wait for an appointment and to hit all the various shops on your list. Again, this information is often available on the boutique’s website, so be sure to check there. And if you’re planning to drive a bit out of town, then you might only be limited to shopping on the weekend, which of course can make the shopping process last longer.

Many brides and grooms are skipping the shops altogether and shopping online! This can be a fantastic choice to speed up the buying process. You’re not limited to store hours or appointment time limits, so you can browse when stores are closed and for as long as you like! And depending on where you order your dress or suit, you can still try on at home and return if it doesn't live up to what you saw online. Shopping online also opens more opportunities for vintage pieces in a wider variety of sizes. But you usually can’t return it if you don’t like it as much in person after purchasing. 

Total time frame: 1 day - 4 weeks

How to make this part go faster:

⏱️ Be decisive (easier said than done!)

⏱️ Stay closer to home so you can do shopping between work and life and not wait for the weekend

⏱️ Maybe consider shopping online

Awaiting the order:

Once you’ve found the dress / suit / outfit of your wedding dreams – now to actually get it in your hands!

There are really two possibilities here - buying off the rack, and special ordering. 

Not all bridal boutiques offer to buy the dress models they have in-store, in which case you have to special order. This process can take weeks to months.

We sampled some specialty wedding gown stores in the Cedar Rapids and greater Eastern Iowa area, and saw estimated ordering times from 2 weeks (if the designer has that style and size in stock), all the way up to 7, 8, or even 10+ months. This all depends on the designer and manufacturer. So two dresses in the same shop can have very different ordering times.

If you’re doing your shopping elsewhere, however, you’re likely to have shorter lead times. Chain department stores like Dillards, Macy’s, or Von Maur can connect with their network of stores and get a different size delivered from another location in a couple weeks. If you’re shopping second-hand or vintage, you take it home that day.

Suit options are similar (off the rack or special order), but longer ordering times are more restricted to custom, made-to-fit suits. Danifodi Custom Suits in Des Moines mentions ordering your custom suit no less than 2-3 months before your event. Tuxedo rentals in the Cedar Rapids area instruct their customers to submit measurements no less than 4-6 weeks before your event. Shipping times from Men’s Wearhouse, with locations in Cedar Rapids, Coralville, & Davenport, quote a similar 2-6 weeks for your suit order to arrive.

Ordering online yourself can have a mixed bag of possibilities. So if you’re in a time crunch, be sure to carefully check the lead time for your style of interest. Many online wedding dress retailers still need many weeks to fulfill your order. For custom suits online, the popular company Indochino, for example, lists a 4-6 week processing and shipping time, whereas you can receive a suit from Nordstrom online or Amazon in just 2 weeks.

Total time frame: 1 day - 10 months

How to make this process faster:

⏱️ Shop at bridal and formal wear boutiques that offer buying off the rack. Specify that’s what you’re looking for when you make your appointment so they don’t show you options you can only special order

⏱️ Go non-traditional and shop at vintage/second-hand stores, or larger department stores with formal attire departments

⏱️ Try shopping online, but keep an eye on order times for different retailers

Alterations: 

Finally, you have your wedding apparel in your hands! Now it’s time to get the perfect fit.

Wait, but what if I ordered my dress or suit? Why would I need to get it fitted or altered? Shouldn’t it be my size?

In theory, yes! But when you are ordering a wedding dress from a specialty boutique, the designer is not cutting a dress specifically to your measurements. They are ordering you a size based on your largest measurement. They are still fitting you into a standard size, just using your measurements as a guide. Similar when ordering suits. There are standard sizes, but as we all know, standard sizes don’t perfectly fit most of us. 

Enter the alterations specialists!

If you are ordering a truly custom-made dress or suit, that of course is another situation. Ideally you will have nearly nothing to alter once your custom piece arrives. But there still may be some tweaking needed based on how the garment actually fits on your body. Needing some minor alterations to a custom piece at a first fitting is not a negative reflection on your custom seamstress or tailor. It’s just an expected part of the custom-fit process. If you live close to where you’ve ordered your custom piece, you’ll likely have alterations included in your order. But if your wedding garment was ordered from farther than you’re willing to travel, you may need to find a local tailor to take care of any final adjustments for you.

At our tailoring and alterations shop in Cedar Rapids, we take care of every kind of alteration you may need for your wedding dress or wedding suit. Wedding dresses tend to be the most complicated and time-consuming article of clothing to alter, so they get the longest turnaround time. In our shop, we quote a 4 week minimum on wedding dress alterations. Suits tend to have an approximately 2 week turnaround. These time frames can change depending on the time of year and how busy the tailoring shop is, but we don’t tend to stray too far. Always call to ask for our current turnaround time!

How to shortcut this turnaround time? We offer a rush fee for any orders needed faster than our current turnaround time. For wedding dresses, the rush fee starts at $50, and for suits, it starts at $25. When you opt for the rush fee, you can have your wedding attire perfectly fitted in one week. In some cases, in as little as 2 days! Yes, we have made miracles happen.

If you’re ordering a wedding dress from a specialty boutique, they will either have an in-house seamstress, or an independent one they refer their clientele to. In general, we see that in-house seamstresses working at a bridal boutique tend to have longer turnaround times, up to 3-4 months. 

Total time frame: 1 week - 4 months

How to make this process faster:

⏱️ Visit an independent alterations shop as their turnaround times can to be shorter than in-shop bridal boutique alterations (be sure to ask if they work on formal wear!)

⏱️ Pay the rush fee

The ultimate Wedding Wardrobe Timeline

And with that, here is the ultimate Wedding Wardrobe Timeline! Complete with all the time frames listed above. Feel free to download and share this graphic with anyone in your life working on their wedding wardrobe. Wedding planning can be complex, and at times it can feel impossible to get all one’s ducks in a row. But we hope that this gave at least some small amount of clarity to a part of that process — your wedding attire.

Congratulations and best of luck! We at Merci’s Tailoring wish you all the love and happiness in this new part of your life!