The Budget

"Can’t buy me love"... but you can, in theory at least, buy your perfectwedding day . Unfortunately, if you’re like 99% of the population, money is an issue and if you want that perfect wedding day, you have to decide on a budget - and stick to it. Nowhere is this more applicable than the wedding dress.

Finding the perfect dress is certainly one of the most enjoyable and exciting parts of the wedding preparations, it is seldom if ever easy – and what fun would it be if it was easy?… The style, the silhouette, the cut, the fabric all have to be just right so that the dress fits you like a perfectly? And no matter how many designs and styles you may consider your final decision will rest on one factor alone: your budget.

It’s lovely to spend hours browsing dresses in magazines and on the Internet but realistically, the first thing you should do is to decide on your budget. After that decision has been made you can look at dresses in that price range.


Doing otherwise is really just wasting time and could lead to dissatisfaction. The sooner you start looking at what you can afford, the longer you will have to find the perfect dress. The fact is, ladies we can’t all wear Vera Wang – but the fact is, too that we can all look good!

The cost of your wedding dress can vary enormously, depending on the style of the wedding and also the content of your purse and your taste.

It’s every bride-to-be’s fantasy to have a private fitting in a Paris, London or New York atelier but the reality is more likely to be that you are on a tight or fixed budget and the dress of your dreams is more than a little out of your price range.

If you have to have that designer dress, websites like The Dressmarket now give you options the didn’t exist even a few years ago. On the site you have access to dozens of once-worn (sometimes never worn) dresses from the world’s leading designers at prices that mean that a Vera Wang dress suddenly does become possible.

Using the Dressmarkett is an excellent and cost-effective way to buy a once-in-a lifetime designer dress at a fraction of the original price, usually in perfect condition. Of course, once the day is over, a good dry cleaner will restore a wedding dress to its pristine condition and you can re-sell the dress on The Dressmarket and recoupe much of your original outlay. That’s why you will find that most sellers in our site have had their dresses dry-cleaned for this very reason.