by Dawn Davies
A couple of days before she headed back to school, my daughter and I visited an upscale bridal shop. When we told the saleslady that my daughter was nineteen, she blinked, but held her tongue. My daughter unfolded a few photos of gowns she had ripped out of Modern Bride and handed them to the saleslady, who disappeared inside a row of tightly packed dresses covered in thick, groaning plastic, and came out nearly bowled over by the weight of several gowns draped over her shoulders. None of them had price tags. She disappeared with my daughter into a dressing room, while I sat outside and chewed a cuticle. When I had gotten married the first time, I bought an off-the-rack dress made of lace and plastic sequins. It looked like it was worth every bit of the ninety-nine dollars I paid for it. I bought used for my second marriage … a sleeveless bodice top and matching skirt of plain off-white satin that looked like a whole dress when put together. It was also under a hundred dollars. I’m the kind of person who buys a pair of shoes and has them resoled when they wear out, so I couldn’t see the point of wasting money on a dress I would never wear again.
“You ready, Mom?” the saleslady asked.
“Bring it on,” I said. My daughter glided out covered in a creamy spillage of fabric … it was fitted, with a tight bodice, and a full skirt, there was some satin, and a lace overlay, and some sort of special lace see-through part on the top that hinted at a collar, but with skin underneath. That’s about all I can say to describe it, other than the look on my daughter’s face was more exquisite than the dress. I stood up.
“This is the one, Mom,” she said.
“It’s the first one you’ve tried on. It can’t be the one. Can it?” I looked at the saleslady.
“It is,” my daughter gushed.
“I am good,” the saleslady said.
“What kind of dress is this?” I asked.
“It’s a Pronovias.”
“I don’t know what that means. How much is it?”
“It’s twenty-nine ninety-nine,” the saleslady said.
“You’re saying it’s three thousand dollars?”
“It’s worth every penny. You can’t do better than Pronovias.”
“I love it, Mom,” my daughter said.
“I’ve paid less for cars I’ve owned, and I certainly drove them more than once. Sorry. I’m having a bit of sticker shock.” I sat back down and fanned myself.
“Do you want me to get you a cup of water?”
Over the next hour, my daughter tried on several more gowns, each as stunning as the previous one, but her heart was set on the Pronovias.
“I’ve got to have that dress,” she said. “It’s like it was made for me.”
“There were jumper cables pulling it tight in the back. It was clearly not made for you.”
“I need it.”
“Well, get a night job, because the cost of that dress is the budget for your entire wedding.”
Later that week, I went online to see if I could track down a cheaper Pronovias source, perhaps a discount shop of slightly irregular dresses whose beading had come undone, or whose lace had sagged slightly, or perhaps one with a small smudge on the hem that would knock down the price by twenty-seven hundred dollars or so. An ad popped up that said, “Pronovias Dresses 70% off!!!” I clicked, and down the rabbit hole I went, into an online world of frantic brides-to-be who were looking to fit impossible budgets, and of Chinese dressmakers, happily copying custom gowns for a fraction of the price, and shipping them to privileged Americans looking for the ever-elusive deal.
First she must take pictures of her gowns. Her cousin was a good photographer. Then a Web presence in places where people don’t know how to do anything for themselves anymore … like the UK, and America. If she could get a few international clients, and they told their other rich friends, her business could take off. She would have more money for materials, she could hire other workers to sew. In fact, other dressmakers were using the original gowns as representations of their own work. Perhaps she could do that …
Dear WeddingGown96,
I am looking to have a wedding gown made for my daughter. Can you copy designs from photographs?
Gratefully,
Dawn Davies
Dear Mr. Davies Dawn,
Yes. I make all wedding dresses any type. Handmade. Please upload photos of dress you would like. And photo of your daughter please. Then click on link here to see how to send measurements. Send all measurements and photos to me and I will make dress for you. I will give you price when I see dress.
Gratefully,
Joan
WeddingGown96
Dear Joan,
Thank you so much for taking this project on. The dress is a Pronovias from the 2013 collection. Attached are three photos of it. Also attached are a few photos of my daughter, as well as her measurements, as requested. I am looking forward to getting your quote. She really likes this dress.
Yours truly,
Dawn
Dear Davies Dawn,
I will make dress for you for $168 USD. Shipping $20 USD. Please see attached link for how to pay. Also, please choose your satin color from the list in another attached link. I will make dress custom and ship to you. You have found the right dressmaker to make your dreams come true, but please be patient. Special things take time.
Yours truly,
Joan
WeddingGown96
Dear Joan,
Thank you very much. Are you sure you can make this dress exactly like the one in the photo for $168 USD? Same materials, same cut? Same everything?
Dawn
Dear Mr. Dawn,
Yes. Dress will be exactly the same. We have three generation dressmaker in my family. I will start as soon as payment is made and your daughter will have beautiful dress for her beautiful day.
Thank you,
Joan
WeddingGown96
I began to wonder about Joan, often late at night, when scrolling obsessively through Pinterest for cheap wedding ideas. First, I suspected her given name wasn’t Joan, because, well, she was Chinese, and the Chinese I knew seemed to choose American names when dealing with Americans. This made me sad, although I recognized that if I were in China, I would be thrilled to choose a Chinese name to replace my American one. The Chinese people I knew also seemed to pick odd, vaguely Catholic names from older generations, as if they watched television shows from the 1960s and 1970s: Maryann, Fiona, Margaret; Bobby, Nick, Walt. It’s as if they suspected a communication breakdown because we can’t handle pronouncing foreign names, or we demand that things feel comfortably American in order to hand over our money. Mostly, I wondered about my Americanness: wanting a $3,000 gown for $168, demanding something handmade by someone whom I wasn’t convinced was free from working in a sweatshop. Was there even a Joan?
I found a wedding forum thread for women who had, foolishly or not, taken a gamble on Chinese knockoff gowns. They each posted their original dress inspiration, shared the names of the Chinese companies that were making their custom gowns, waited a few months for the dresses to arrive, then took pictures of everything, from the packaging, to the package partially open during mid-reveal, to the white or off-white of the gown bursting from the package like a canister of ready-bake biscuits. Then came the unfolding of the gown and the selfies of the bride-to-be wearing her new creation. Sometimes there was a hit—a well-made gown of decent material that, when you squinted, somewhat resembled the original gown enough to wear it with only minor alterations, but most of them were misses. Cockeyed, acid-trip misses with mismatched satin colors, cheap glued-on beading, badly sewn, poorly sized monstrosities that the women, in a sort of unwritten rule, had to declare that they wouldn’t be caught dead in, although it had been worth a try.
I realized that these were more than women who simply wanted a deal. These were women who were willing to gamble and lose. They liked the idea of the unknown and weren’t afraid to be disappointed for the chance that they ended up sticking it to the wedding industry man by ge
tting a $2,000 gown for $150. The smart ones built in time to find another dress if the Chinese one came out badly, but a few were forced to scramble and buy something last minute and—horror of horrors—off the rack. I realized I was one of those women who liked the gamble. I wanted to play the game. I envisioned Joan poring over the Pronovias gown late into the night, using her savant-like dressmaking skills to re-create a live gown from a photograph and some measurements. Despite seeing some of the other Chinese knockoffs, I hoped my daughter’s dress would be perfect. I knew this could be done—my grandmother had been a seamstress and could study a dress in a shop window, then go home and make it from memory with patterns she cut out of brown paper bags.
I imagined Joan taking her lunch break, perhaps sitting outside of her shop in an alley, talking to other shopkeepers, a bowl of noodles and meat balanced on her knees, her straight black hair cut neatly to her chin in the type of simple bob that caused swells of jealousy in me when I saw one on the street. I wondered what kind of personality she had to have to pore over a seam for two hours until she got it right, to sew satin button loop closures by hand, pairing them with round, satin buttons spaced a quarter of an inch apart, all the way from the sacrum to the neck. Did she listen to the radio, or perhaps watch television? Did she work with other seamstresses or tailors? Was she committed to her craft, or was dressmaking a fallback? I grew to believe that Joan was a college-age girl like my own daughter, a quiet spirit with patience and a domestic side, one who loved the romance of weddings, one for whom US$168 represented a tidy sum of money. I became deeply interested in the creation process, and loved that I was communicating with someone across the world. I would compose an e-mail at night to someone so far away, and wake up, with a little thrill, to a return e-mail from Chinese Joan, the magical seamstress, with a price quote, or an update, or a photograph. This dress became my precious, and also a symbol of my ability to do one final thing for my daughter to make her happy before she grew up and got married. I wanted this dress to be perfect with all my heart for those reasons, and also because I didn’t want to have to tell anyone I had bought a Chinese knockoff.
Dear Joan,
I’m not trying to rush you or anything, but I was wondering if you have any pictures of the dress in whatever stage of completion it is in. I like seeing the process. Would you mind sending me a photo or two?
All best,
Dawn
Dear Dawn,
Don’t worry. Your dress is almost finish. Here are some photos of it. You can see fine satin we use. It will be ready in a few weeks.
All best,
Joan
WeddingGown96
Dear Joan,
Thank you for your kind attention. The dress looks very nice, although it looks like it is a very bright white satin, and not the off-white we selected. The color we selected was more like a candlelight white, or ecru. Can you confirm that you are indeed using off-white-colored satin? And the lace at the neckline doesn’t look as small as the lace on the Pronovias gown. In fact, it looks like a large-pattern lace all over the chest, which is nothing like the Pronovias gown.
Thank you,
Dawn
Dear Dawn,
Don’t worry. The lace is fine. I changed it. The satin is off-white. It’s just photograph lighting that make it look white. Please be patient.
Joan
WeddingGown96
Meanwhile, the summer after freshman year, my daughter signed with a modeling agency in Miami and decided to take her fall sophomore semester off from school to figure out how to make her educational dreams match her impending marriage reality. One option would be to model for a while, because not everyone gets that opportunity, then finish up at a state school in the armpit of a town where she and her husband would be living after he finished law school, though neither of us liked that idea.
“Remember how much you hated the meaninglessness of public school? How it made you nuts?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s exactly what it’s going to be like at Sunshine State U. This school is basically a community college with ‘state’ in the name. When all is said and done, you will have not escaped a Florida government education and you will have not escaped Florida. In fact, I predict you will never leave Florida if you choose this path.” My daughter started to cry.
While she was deciding what to do, she dieted down to stick size to please the modeling industry, she went on casting calls, and she argued with her fiancé about the merits of an elite liberal arts education. She lived at home with us and saw her fiancé in the evenings and on weekends. A few weeks after I plunked down a nonrefundable $1,500 to hold their wedding venue, they broke up. My husband and I cheered silently for a few days until they got back together. My daughter became disgusted with the modeling industry and went back to school in the spring, taking a double load so she could make up the lost time of her missing semester. She took econometrics and two honors seminars, in addition to a regular course load, practically killing herself to catch back up to her class. Still the dress had not arrived.
Dear Joan,
It is now February and it has been nearly three months since I have ordered the dress. I am wondering if everything is okay. Has it been lost in shipping, perhaps?
Worried,
Dawn
Dear Davies Dawn,
Like I say, special things take time. We had Chinese New Year and holiday time in our village. I ordered different lace since you were not happy with the lace. Dress will be shipping soon.
Joan
WeddingGown96
Davies Dawn,
Your dress has shipped on 28/2. I hope you find it satisfactory and that your daughter has the wedding of her dreams.
All best,
Joan
WeddingGown96
I came home one afternoon in late March to find a large paper-wrapped throw pillow on our front porch. My heart started to pound. I took it inside to the kitchen counter, where I turned it over and over, marveling at the Chinese writing, and odd international stamps, the old-fashioned paper wrapping that made it look like it was from another era. I snipped it open carefully, using a bikini incision in the lower half of the top section. A scramble of yellow plastic erupted forth like a spill of abdominal fat. This I cut through gently, pushing it aside to find a smoother, shiny, almost fibrous section of plastic wrap underneath that was tougher and tighter. I needed to go more carefully now. Underneath this shiny layer was another protective layer wrapped crosswise, this one red and ball-like. I snipped through this one more precisely still, and saw my first sign of skinlike satin … white and clean amidst the yellow and red and brown wrapping. I pulled the final layer of wrapping away and lifted the gown out like a baby. It unfolded reluctantly, stiffly, as if it had held its position a long time. I held it at arm’s length and let the skirt fall to the floor. I looked carefully, and my hopes fell. The dress was nothing like the Pronovias gown my daughter had tried on. It was ice-cold white, and the lace around the neckline and covering the bodice was the kind of lace I saw dressing the kitchen windows of the old Polish and Italian Catholic ladies in my grandmother’s alley in Scranton, Pennsylvania—thick, squirrelly, curtain-looking stuff. The waist was too high, the satin cheap, and in the back there was a zipper, a finely sewn one at least, where a trail of buttons should have been. The workmanship was lovely, the stitches fine and neat, the lining done beautifully, the bodice had a structured shape to it. However, this ugly baby was no Pronovias copy, not even a bastard son. This was a distant cousin, if at all.
When my second daughter got home from class, I made her try on the dress so we could send pictures to her sister. She did so reluctantly, since she thought her sister getting married at nineteen was about as smart as playing live Frogger across the highway at night. She also didn’t trust the fiancé.
“I’ve met horses I trusted more, and I’ve known some nasty horses,” she said as she slid into the dress. “She’s going to wear this? This
thing is wretched. I feel like a turd in a candy wrapper.” She held her elbows out as if her armpits had a rash.
“Here. Stand better. Like this. Smile. No, never mind. Don’t. Just stand there.”
The sneer pulling at her upper lip was not able to be disguised by the pose. We texted the photos to the bride-to-be. Call us when you get this, we said. Two minutes later the phone rang. We put her on speaker.
“What the fuck is this? Is this from a Halloween store?” she asked. “Why is she posing like that? Was something biting her?”
“I ordered it online. It didn’t work out.”
“You bought a Chinese knockoff, didn’t you?”
“How’d you know?”
“Because it’s exactly the kind of thing that would attract you, Mom. I’m not at all surprised.”
“Neither am I,” said her sister.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We still have time to get something legit.”
“Yeah, about that … we might not be needing it.”
“You found another dress?” we said together.
“No, but things aren’t looking good on the wedding front.”
“Well, okay, but could you at least make up your mind before I spend any more money?”
“I’ll pay you back, Mom. Every penny. At this point, I think it would be worth it to just cut our losses.”
* * *
She called me on the phone right before finals. She was sobbing, which was nothing new, because she’d called me sobbing during every finals week since she left for school, the kind of sobbing where she sounded like she had just fallen off a seesaw or gotten hit in the solar plexus with a football and had knocked the breath out of herself: shallows gasps of air and a gibberish with no Germanic language base. But this time was different. This time she could talk. And she was mad.