A Dress Story

Since I've already started in on the anniversary posts (I couldn't just have one, could I?), I have a wedding-related story to tell you.  Well, actually, it's an engagement-related story, I suppose.

It's about my dress.

{you've seen this before}

I haven't told you much about our engagement (or anything about it, actually) and that was on purpose.  I've been reluctant to talk about it because it was so private, much more private than our wedding (which clearly, I have bored you to death spoken at length about), and I'm a little afraid of shaking the glitter off that day.  I'm also a little afraid that the sugary fairytale-ness of it all will make you want to barf, and then you will associate my blog with nausea and you will never want to read it again because you'll be so traumatized by the cheesiness.  But then again, everyone loves a dress story, no?  So I'll make it short.

Brian proposed to me in Florence, at sunset, in a piazza overlooking our beautiful city blanketed in a layer of unexpected snow, with a bottle of wine in hand and no one else around.  He got on one knee, I got on both.  It was everything.

After the sun went down and we soaked up our chianti, we carefully picked our way back down the iced cobblestone stairs, commenting on what a tragically hilarious story it would make if we ended this night with a slip-and-fall trip to the Italian ER rather than a dinner at Il Santo Bevitore.  Luckily, we made it to the bottom with all of our extremities in tact.

{this was actually taken on the way up, before the dark set in, transforming this picturesque staircase into a death trap}

Then we strolled through the old streets of Florence, under the twinkly Christmas lights, both of us smiling like dumb Americans, a ring on my finger and a warm Tuscan meal in our future.

As we turned onto another vaguely familiar street, I caught a glimpse of something poofy and sparkly and white in a store window -- a wedding dress!  I remember that place, I thought.  I had passed the boutique years before when we studied in Florence and when I was young enough not to pay more than a second's notice to a wedding dress in a window.  But now, this store and this dress were suddenly relevant; now, I could be one of those girls, ringing the buzzer for an appointment, and trying on the dress in the window.

How funny, I thought, that we should pass this place now.  And how appropriate, I thought, that the dress in the window was so gorgeous and wow, I would totally wear that.  It was a coincidence worthy of a picture, and so I snapped this shot:

A year later, after our wedding, I printed the pictures from our engagement trip to make an album, and I came across this off-hand snapshot.  That was a pretty dress, I thought.  And then I looked closer.  Atelier Aimee, reads the window inscription.

Atelier Aimee...Atelier Aimee?!  As in, the designer that has only one workshop in Rome and a flagship store in Florence?  As in, the designer who made my actual wedding dress, which was the very first wedding dress I ever tried on?  As in, my dress, purchased from discount store all the way in San Francisco, might actually have come from that shop?!

Yes, that Atelier Aimee.

Sometimes, I don't know what to believe.