This isn’t the prettiest room I’ve ever been in, but it has more that is pretty in it than any room I’ve ever seen. Between hardwood floors and wood-beamed ceilings that sit too low, there is floating organza and tulle, lace and jewels and horsehair-trimmed ruffles—dresses that are never quite white, but instead ivory or diamond or pearl or dove grey or blush. The walls, painted a clean mint and regal with paneled white crown molding, are adorned with 1870s fashion plates from Peterson’s Magazine. There are two stone fireplaces, and on their white mantels sit antique family wedding photographs. The furniture has cabriole legs. The coasters are covered in pearls. The golden chandelier light catches Swarovski crystals here and there so your eyes can never adjust to or forget just how dizzying it is—the prettiness. It is the type of pretty that makes me pause before I step out of my car—“something borrowed,” incidentally—each Saturday morning when I arrive at The White Dress by the Shore to observe a day of bridal appointments. I sit parked for a moment outside this cream-colored 1763 Clinton, Connecticut, home—with its wide white porch and a yard that pales in autumn beneath leaves falling over it like a patterned blusher veil—and find myself in an almost bridal state of anxiety. I have the presence of mind to leave my Herschel backpack in the car, because it needs to be washed and takes up too much space in a shop in which I’m already too tall. I take an extended look in the rearview mirror, which shows me that my curls are drying in a fit of blonde frizz and my skin looks the way flawed skin looks when you try to fix it with makeup: still flawed. I am reminded of the foldout blue-and-pink Fisher-Price Dream Dollhouse I had when I was small, of my unwillingness to let my older sister’s outdated dolls and dirtied doll furniture inside its walls. There then was an early curatorial instinct; a keen awareness of what was pretty, and what was not; an anxiety that it was all beyond my control. Years later, there was a second idea: that intelligence and feminism meant not caring about prettiness—and a second anxiety: I cared anyway. I practice a smile and a sentence, run through a mental reminder to be friendly but not overeager, clever but not intellectual, confident but not loud or unapproachable. I’m not a bride—and at 21 will not be for many years, if ever. But at The White Dress by the Shore, I am never exempt from being a girl. Beth Lindsay Chapman, who turned this old colonial into a couture bridal boutique ten years ago, does not share my anxieties. Beth herself—once a stunning bride in white taffeta and capped sleeves—is Queen Bee incarnate: 37 years old, with shoulder-length blonde hair, the coloring of a Barbie doll, and the tiny, well-sculpted body of a college athlete (she had to quit her college track team because of a hip injury but still exercises six days a week). She has undeviatingly straight, pearl-white teeth and is impeccably dressed—on my first Saturday, she wears a knee-length black leather A-line dress with a trapezoidal cut-out in the back, black velvet pointed-toe wedges, and a necklace of three large gold saucers to match her watch and bracelet. She rivals the room’s beauty and knows Girl World like the big white diamond on the fourth finger of her left hand. She calls everyone “my dear,” and says, “Let’s play” when it’s time to think accessories. The first announces her monarchic hold on the boutique’s femininity, the second that she still maintains a democratic belief in bridal fantasy. Let’s regress to when you were small, the latter tells Beth’s customers. To when you dreamed yourself up for the very first time. Beth may not share my unease, but she mirrors my instincts. “Everything has to be perfect,” she says of her boutique—and of the shopping experience within it. For the most part, it is. This is a North Pole of weddings, a world that runs on the girly giddiness of a never-ending engagement, and down to the details everything is dear. In the bathroom, I find an antique white toilet plunger, with a clear plastic stem filled with rice. Atop the end of the handle are two plastic figurines: bride and groom, quite literally ready for the plunge. But perhaps the most perfectly bridal thing about Beth’s boutique—the most dizzying thing of all—is that there is always room for improvement. Beth’s picture frames are occasionally tacky, as are the plastic faux-glass chalices in which she serves her customers water and too-dear stacks of tiny bridal books in the bathroom and fireplace. The White Dress by the Shore it is not quite by the shore, either. Clinton sits along the Long Island Sound, sure, and if you were to go half a mile straight down Waterside Lane you could drive right through the little blue front office of Old Harbor Marina and right into the water, but it’s not as though you can actually see the shore from The White Dress by the Shore. It’s by the shore in that real estate prices are higher and the last names are WASPier and even the grocery stores seem to have historic value. The whole area is invigorated by the proximity, the possibility. But it’s still by the shore in the way that a little girl who lives in Orlando lives by Disney World, or that a suburb is by the city; that is to say: there are gaps between here and there, and they are filled with aspiration.

JENNY, WITH PLATINUM BLONDE HAIR CLIPPED MESSILY atop the crown of her head, a full face of foundation, and a body that’s slightly too big for The White Dress by the Shore’s size 8 sample dresses, has been shopping online for weeks before coming into the boutique. She walks through the front door to the sound of a bell (*ting*) on a Saturday at noon, her mother and grandmother in tow. “Dream a little dream of me” drifts down from the stereo. Marie, who is studying to be a kindergarten teacher, marrying her high school sweetheart, and choosing to have a very simple Catholic wedding, stands in front of the main shop-floor mirror in a lace strapless Augusta Jones trumpet dress called Jayma. She’s trying to decide whether her earrings should be oval or marquise-shaped. (Beth finally convinces her to go oval—“You get more sparkle”). Beth brings Marie a Kate Spade heel and has her sit so she can slip it onto her foot. “I feel like Cinderella,” Marie says with a tiny bit of discomfort, to which Beth replies, “You should feel like Cinderella!” Jenny’s mother is impressed. “Isn’t this such a dollhouse?!” she exclaims. Jenny’s grandmother’s eyes scan the room for a dress that’s actually white. But Jenny is here for a specific purpose: today is the Hayley Paige trunk show—meaning the designer has brought in dresses that are not normally stocked in-house and all purchases are discounted 10%—and Jenny loves Hayley Paige. Ask any attendant at The White Dress and she will tell you this: there are certain basics to choosing a wedding dress. A general thought to shape—A-line, empire-waist, drop-waist, ball gown, trumpet, sheath, mermaid—is a good first step. Beth can tell a bride which dresses she should be trying on from just an across-the-room glimpse. Petite brides should avoid ball gowns—or risk getting swallowed. Comfortably curvy brides might consider a mermaid (tight through the bodice, with a fairly aggressive flair at the knee) or a trumpet (which flairs more gradually at the bottom, like the bell of a trumpet). Tall, lanky brides can pull off a drop waist (also known as a fit-to-flair), a shapeless sheath, a ball gown. Mostly anyone can do an A-line. Then, a few other considerations, as every White Dress attendant asks every bride: How do you feel about lace? Beading? Sleeves? A corseted bodice? Structured fabric? But you can breeze through all of this and the biggest question of all is still in front of you: What kind of bride do you want to be? That’s a question brides have been answering with their dresses since the first time a prominent bride wore a white wedding dress: 1840, when Queen Victoria married Prince Albert. Victoria recognized that the ostentatious royal wedding dresses in silver and gold that she’d seen before hers were signs of transactional weddings, sewing tight political and diplomatic alliances. But she was already Queen, and she didn’t want her wedding to Albert to look like all the others. So she eschewed tradition in favor of something simpler, more contemporary: a white, silk satin and lace dress with a low wide neckline and a deep V at the waist. She chose romance, and—with the well-publicized choice of Honiton English lace to support the struggling domestic lace industry—patriotism. It rained on Victoria’s wedding day, but her white dress had its effect all the same. It was a dress that brides could aspire to: they, too, could have their day as royalty. The interim has seen dresses to match aspirations, aspirations to match each decade. The 1940s meant wartime frugality: rayon replaced silk, veils were forgone, trains shortened—while the 50s gave rise to newly full skirts, layers of rich fabrics. The 60s brought secondwave feminism, with Mia Farrow married in a pixie cut and a little white dress suit, Audrey Hepburn in a mini-dress and headscarf. Flowing sleeves, flower head wreaths, and bridal blouses emerged with the hippie brides of the early 70s. In the mid-80s, my mother wore a dress that looked a bit like Princess Diana’s—but with more lace and smaller sleeves. What’s been certain along the way is what Rebecca Mead called in her 2003 New Yorker article “You’re Getting Married,” the “democratization of princessdom.” It’s clearer now more than ever, however, that a princess has infinite options. At this year’s October Bridal Market—one of two main annual buying events for dress retailers in the U.S.—runway collections included crop tops, cut-outs, studded leather, fur-lined sleeves, tealength gowns (back from the 60s) and even a wedding dress rendered entirely in knitted wool. According to the 2014 American Wedding Study, 11% of brides are now opting for non-white dresses, separates, cocktail-length, or jumpsuits. If variations on the traditional dress aren’t enough of an indication, we’re also well secured in the Internet Age—which means there’s always more to see: 75% of brides are now using social media to gather wedding day inspiration; 64% are using Pinterest to pin it all together; 63% are using a social-media app to shop. The White Dress by the Shore’s own website links to its very active Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram accounts, as well as its blog. The result is an irresistible nexus of bridal gems, the next always just a click or a scroll away. It means that the possibilities are unbounded; so too is a bride’s imagination. This imagination has become the heart and soul of the U.S. wedding industry, estimated by The Wedding Report to be worth $54.3 billion in 2013 alone. There are more than two million weddings in the United States every year, and the average cost of each is upwards of $25,000. The average cost of a wedding dress: $1,200.

BETH SAYS THAT THE THE WHITE DRESS BY THE Shore is for “classic-with-a-twist” brides, which among other things means that they will all spend more than the national average on their wedding dresses. Hayley Paige, a budding designer known for fresh, flirty, femininewith- a-slight-edge silhouettes, is for the girliest of these brides. Hers are the ball gowns that flower girls point to first. Hers are the tulle skirts and bejeweled bodices that shyer brides eye with cautious intrigue. I do both. By the time Jenny, Jenny’s mother, Jenny’s grandmother, newish bridal attendant Tiffany, and I make it up the stairs to Versailles (all the dressing rooms, posh little parlors with curtains for privacy, have names: Versailles, Paris, Nice, Venice, Capri—“Europe is fun for girls,” Beth explains), Jenny’s mother is laughing. The ten or so dresses Jenny has selected from the shop floor are blinged-out, if you will—though in a way that is expensive-looking rather than gaudy. “You’ve always loved the drama!” her mom says. It takes us another two hours to narrow this lot down to three, by which time the mother-of-the-bride, grandmother-of-the-bride, and I are all in cahoots. We crack up at the shifting and heavy breathing that come from Jenny and Tiffany behind the curtain, and again when an unexplained foot pops out from beneath it. I take our camaraderie as one of few Girl World successes I’ll have at The White Dress by the Shore; one of the few stretches of time in which I’m able to shake my inner disquiet. To some extent I chalk it up to a staple activity of Girl World: girls suspending self-evaluation by evaluating other girls. But the rest, I think, is something else. It’s a regression to when I was small and the world was big; to a Fisher Price Dream Dollhouse; to an early curatorial instinct; to a keen awareness of what is pretty and what is not. But this time there is no anxiety. Jenny is an imperfect bride, only prettyish. But she wants it all, and for a few hours I think that for at least that one day—her wedding day—she can have it. Each new dress Jenny tries on is our favorite, a fact we convey to one another silently, with a lot of mouthing and made-up hand signals, until Grandma bows out of our whisperfest with a resigned “I just like the white one” (referring to the stark white one—already eliminated). Lana, from the Spring 2014 collection, is for the fun bride. It has a twisted sweetheart neckline and a tiered ruffled skirt lined with horsehair to provide flounce. It is ivory cashmere and net, and the fabric is textured by a square, maze-like geometric pattern throughout. I’ve never seen anything like it. Mom and I love it. Conrad, from Spring 2015, is romantic. Underneath is a sleeveless V-neck mini-dress, and over the top is an A-line lace and tulle overskirt that falls in line with a tulle overskirt trend Beth swears she started. The problem is that the sample mini-dress is too small for Jenny, and can’t be pulled over her hips. We can all see right through the dress to Jenny’s turquoise underwear. Grandma keeps saying, “But this one’s see-through!” Dani, from Fall 2014, is a slightly pink A-line—a princess gown, through and through. The skirt is English net, with a tiny accordion fold if you look very closely, and the bodice (which also has a sweetheart neckline) is fully beaded in silver and white. By itself it’s the clear winner of the three, but I think the coloring is lessthan- excellent on Jenny’s also-slightly-pink skin. It’s her favorite, though, so Mom and I coo along. Beth Chapman, prompted by our cooing, is in the room in under a minute. “I love this. Do you love this?” she says to Jenny, grabbing a veil and a Mari Elena headband (“Fun fact: this is the headband Kelly Clarkson had custom-made for her wedding,” she says) and switching out Jenny’s hairclip. The dress will need some alternations—all White Dress by the Shore brides have three standard fittings before the big day, and Beth has suggested that the cups on this dress may need to be let out for extra coverage with a custom alteration (all wedding dresses are made for B-cups). Still, it looks like The One. There are now five of us spread around the room’s periphery facing Jenny, and then six—Paige, a taller Beth Chapman prototype who is probably my age, is now in the doorway. She also loves Hayley Paige. The room falls silent: we stare at Jenny, we stare at the mirror, we stare at Jenny staring at Jenny in the mirror and at Jenny in the mirror staring back at Jenny staring into the mirror. “You’re ready to go, sister,” says Beth. Mom starts to cry. Grandma starts to cry. Tiffany starts to cry (“I love weddings,” she says). Jenny says, “This is beautiful”—I think she means it—and then asks if she can try on an Ivy Nestor (for a slightly more bohemian bride). She’s getting married in Bali. Beth once told me a story about a bride whose deodorant or cherry body wash (the mystery lives on) dyed the armpits of her dress “Barney purple” in her final fitting (“I had to remain totally calm, but inside I was like, ‘Oh my god, your pits are purple!’”) She’s told me of brides who “flip a lid” making sure that dye lots match during early fittings, and says she can’t tell me how many brides come to their appointments not wearing any underwear at all. She has a pile in her office of the appointment records for “problem brides,” so that she remembers to brace herself each time they return for more shopping or a fitting. Sometimes “princessdom” is laced with lunacy. By the time brides get to their later fittings, a new sort of princess often takes over. She wears Spanx and the right bra from the lingerie shop that Beth recommends, Beneath the Gown. Penny, Beth’s seamstress, has sculpted her wedding dress to fit this new royal body just so. This princess looks in the mirror and is certain, in her newly tailored gown, about what she sees. As one bride, Jaclyn, once told me in a fitting: “I always see Oprah on TV and wonder how she looks so good—because she’s heavy, too. But now I get it!” I see Jenny in the Ivy Nestor and I know that she is neither of these brides, not yet at least. She simply hasn’t found her dress—or if she’s found it, doesn’t quite know how to go from aspiration to something more definite. On her wedding day, a bride is supposed to look the most beautiful and most feminine she ever has, after all. Jenny isn’t just choosing a dress. She’s choosing a limit. The most beautiful she can be. That’s the thing about aspiration: to arrive at anything certain or tangible, it must be capped.

BETH CHAPMAN’S SPENDING CAP FOR THIS SEASON is somewhere around $60,000. She chooses her dresses on an October Thursday, in a petite office at the back of the house she calls “antique.” “Her, I want HER,” she says, nodding her head at an image of a willowy brunette on a runway on the screen of her 27-inch iMac (turned ninety degrees on her desk so that Beth’s assistant, Shana, and I can see). She’s referring to the dress, not the model; strapless, with a French lace corseted bodice that comes to a slight, wide V in the back. She is made of white stripes and her skirt is A-line, folding in on itself in gentle but heavy waves of organza. Deauville is her name, like the equestrian, seaside town in Normandy. In the 1870s, Monet painted Parisian aristocrats there on the beach in white striped day dresses and floral bonnets. The details aren’t so relevant, though—what’s important about the name Deauville is that it’s French, just like every name in the Anne Barge Fall 2015 Collection shown at Bridal Market just two weekends ago. Avallon, Castellane, Giverny, Lyon, and Vendôme—it’s all the same language as couture. “She’s amaaaazeballs,” says Shana, still in the office admiring Deauville. She sits opposite Beth at her desk, and I sit wedged between the end of the desk and the wall (I really do mean it when I say that the office is petite). I add amaaaaaazeballs to a mental list of Shana’s effusive responses to sartorial majesty—notably, “I have a crush on this!” and, several times an hour, “Dreamboat!”— while Beth adds Deauville to an Excel spreadsheet of dresses soon to hang in her boutique. The job of the spreadsheet is manifold: it helps Beth to ensure that her order is well-balanced in terms of size, color, and style; adds up her total expenditure; and multiplies expenditure on each dress by anywhere between 2 (“keystone” markup) and 2.5 (with cheaper dresses marked up slightly more) to determine its By the Shore price. At this point, Beth’s order total for October Bridal Market has just ripped through the $50,000 seam, and she continues to remember designers (she stocks 11 in total) with whom she hasn’t yet placed an order. (“It can be hard to break up with designers,” she explains to me. “Some of them I’ve known for years, and women get emotional.”) The good news, for Beth, is that with the exception of a few unstructured Theia and Jenny Yoo gowns (which sell for around $1500), her dresses sell for between $2800 and $7000. Deauville, in her quiet glamour, will be priced accordingly at $3950. Beth has been in the fashion industry for more than 20 years at this point, but it hasn’t always been this glamorous. Her career began with a summer internship in the cosmetics division of Liz Claiborne’s corporate office in Manhattan, as the administrative assistant for a woman who couldn’t keep an administrative assistant, due in large part to a “screaming and drinking problem.” “I basically lived The Devil Wears Prada.,” she tells me. A large part of her job, Beth recalls, was to cover up her boss’s perpetual lateness. “Sometimes she wouldn’t roll in until eleven o’clock in the morning,” Beth tells me, laughing. “I’d have to keep replacing her coffee so it was constantly steaming and it would look like she was just in a meeting.” After graduating from the University of Connecticut, Beth was offered a job at Ann Taylor. It wasn’t the merchandising job that she wanted, though. Beth was an allocator for shirts and blouses, which meant that she was responsible—based on analyses of Ann Taylor sales by store and region—for deciding how and in what quantities to allocate styles and sizes to stores across the country. What this taught Beth was a skill she has carried with her to this day. Beth knew that Store 286 South Coast Plaza in California sold 2s, 4s, and 6s better than most stores, and that it didn’t sell any 14s. She knew the reverse to be true in the Midwest, and that in the South, sleeveless variations were sometimes necessary. In short, Beth knew to know your girl. Allocation was short-lived, and to Beth’s delight, she was offered a job as an assistant of merchandising a year to the day after she first arrived at Ann Taylor. She spent the next ten years working her way up the corporate ladder to become the VP of Merchandising for Dresses, Suits, Career Separates and the Special Occasion Division. By 2004, she found herself in charge of 40% of Ann Taylor’s volume, “making a lot of money,” and living in Greenwich—finally, a career with a bit of sparkle. It was only then, in the midst of her pregnancy with her second child, that Beth began to realize that the pivotal moment of her career had come years before. Smitten by the likes of a man named Mark Chapman, she’d added a new title to her life résumé. She’d been a bride. Beth’s mother had been living in Madison at the time, but Beth couldn’t find a boutique near the Connecticut shoreline to match her high-fashion sensibilities. Manhattan gown shopping, meanwhile, had been an utter disaster. The gowns were filthy. The associates were rude. Nothing was customizable. Where was the bride in bridal? Beth eventually sought out a designer named Carmela Sutera, who worked one-on-one with her to design the dress of her dreams. In 1997, Beth married in a white dress by the shore. That should have been that—but the bridal fever wouldn’t subside. And so, back to 2004—Beth Chapman decided to open a shop: The White Dress by the Shore. And so, back to 2014, to Beth’s office on a Thursday in October. As the afternoon wears on and the order total rises by the thousands, Shana and Beth are slipping into a state of silly delirium that I understand as stereotypically characteristic of Girl World. Beth, emailing bridal shop owners in Nashville and Salt Lake City and Charleston to get their thoughts on various collections, is signing all her emails “XO” and “Mwah.” Inconsequential banter flows. Beth is confused by the woman from Kleinfeld’s, who apparently was less-than-friendly at Bridal Market— “She used to be so nice to me! Do you think it’s because she knows who I am now?” Hayley Paige is getting married soon—“What do you think she’ll wear?” Then there’s that couple who owns a bridal shop in Utah. They don’t have children, just cats, as Beth explains. “It would be nice to sell to a polygamist family—I sold to two lesbians once, but that’s the best I’ve done,” says Shana, who then describes another boutique owner, that woman, as “LITERALLY on crack,” to which Beth responds, “If I were on crack I wouldn’t have to be doing this right now,” to which Shana responds, “I think if you were on crack you would be pretty different.” From where I sit (still wedged between Beth’s desk and the wall), the anxieties I tried to leave in the car are beginning to seep back, like a sheen of grease from deep in my pores, or like Barney purple pit dye. I shift in my chair, crossing and uncrossing my legs, my arms, my ankles. Sit up straight. Slouch back down. Wiggle to adjust my skirt, wonder if my outfit works. I watch Beth and Shana and their easy, careless banter, and I want none of it and all of it. Just above Shana’s head hangs another of Beth’s tacky printed canvases. On this one is a Coco Chanel quote, written in cursive: “Look for the woman in the dress. If there is no woman, there is no dress,” it reads. I think about asking Beth what it means. Instead, I watch as she pulls up another Anne Barge dress on the screen and pauses. “What’s this one?” she asks. She didn’t see it at Bridal Market. I gasp, because it’s beautiful. A deep V neckline with scalloped lace, a banded waist, and a full, tulle ball gown skirt. Beth turns to me and says, “I think you’d look so pretty in this,” And I think that she really must be an expert, because for the first time since I stepped foot in The White Dress by the Shore, I picture myself as a maybe-one-day bride. And suddenly it occurs to me that I’ve decided what it means, at least to me. I’ve decided there is always a woman in the dress, that I am always seeing a woman in the dress. She is someone else—a Dani or a Lana or a Conrad or a Deauville—or sometimes she is a version of me. But she is never quite me—not exactly. And so she’s always in my way.