Some time later this year I will be able to celebrate 20 years working in the wedding trade, helping brides design, choose and create their wedding gowns.
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A very typical early 1990's style dress, with lace,
frills, big sleeves and hitched skirts.
Image courtesy of wedmagazine.co.uk
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Flipping through my photo albums of the last two decades, it's always fascinating to see how fashions change from one extreme to another, with each new generation thinking they are the first ones ever to think of doing this with that. But looking back, when I first started my training at the
Green Room in
Stoke Bishop, Bristol in 1991, the fashionable wedding dress was big and fluffy, with lace trims, layers and layers of net petticoats, ruched up skirts and flowers stuck on everywhere. Compare that to today's on trend dresses - lace, large skirts with lots of net petticoats, ruched up skirts, and lots of lots of flowers - they suddenly don't sound so very different. But when you put pictures of each side by side, it's amazing to see that they look so incredibly different when they are made up of exactly the same things.
Roses and Lace and All Things Girlie....
My strongest memories of my early days at
The Green Room are of sitting at my little work table in the Bolloms concession that we ran in the other half of our shop unit, making endless silk roses. With the greatest respect to Sylvia, who taught me absolutely everything I ever needed to know when it came to dressmaking, I hated making roses. It was possibly the most boring job in the world next to hand stitching a hem and train of a large, full skirted, fluffy '90s style dress.
