Your wedding day is unquestionably a very special day in anybody's life, however it can also be one of the most expensive. For any bride perhaps the most important item on the shopping list will be her bridal dress and with a growing number of high quality but relatively cheap wedding dresses available nowadays it is possible to have the dress of your dreams without breaking the bank.



For a significiant number of people a wedding dress ought to be a full length white gown, symbolizing the bride�s pure heart and innocence, complete with train and veil first made popular by Queen Victoria when she broke with the royal custom of marrying in silver and selected a white gown for her marriage to Prince Albert. This began a craze which continues today with many brides selecting white or a variation of white like eggshell, cream or ivory.

Now however we are seeing two major changes when it comes to weddings.

The first is a return to those pre-Victorian days during which women married in simple dresses of just about any color which took their fancy, apart from black which was traditionally worn for mourning and red which was reserved for 'a lady of the night'. This also means often dispensing with the veil, which is said to symbolize virginity, in addition to the train which is very much a trapping of royal weddings and which conjures up a picture of the peacock, which was historically seen as a royal bird.

The second is a move away from church weddings towards weddings held in a wide range of venues, including the increasingly popular beach wedding.

As a consequence not only do brides today enjoy a far broader choice of color for their bridal dress but, more importantly, doing away with the train and veil and the requirement for a full length dress now means that brides can pick from a range of far simpler bridal dresses. For those on a tight budget this is great because informal bridal dresses are also considerably less expensive than the full traditional white wedding outfit.

One other important point is that the move away from the full white wedding gown also means that it is no longer necessary to buy your dress from a specialist bridal outfitter who, naturally, will charge you a premium just for the service which is provided or for the name or brand which you are purchasing. It is a little bit like a pair of training shoes � you can purchase two almost identical pairs of shoes and pay seven times more for one pair simply because of its brand name.

There has without doubt never been a better time to shop for your bridal dress and the choice available to you nowadays in terms of style, color and supplier is enormous. It is now fairly easy to find reasonably cheap wedding dresses and still look like a million dollars in your dream dress.