Because wedding photos and videos were one of the most important things to me, I hired a pretty top of the line husband and wife photography team and put a lot of thought into the photo checklist for my wedding. One photo aspect I had been hoping to have for many years is the getting ready photos where the bride and her bridesmaids are wearing getting ready robes. One of the gifts to my bridesmaids (my two older sisters and my best friend) was a luxury silk robe that matched my wedding color with some pretty lace trim.
I will preface this by saying we have shared modesty standards in that we don’t wear anything that shows cleavage, garments go below our knees, and we don’t wear anything tight / form fitting. This in mind, I made sure to find robes long enough and had given the girls a heads up to bring an undershirt and an under slip (as “backup”), and I also brought safety pins so that they would feel completely covered. Please note they did not know exactly why I had asked them to bring the additional undergarments since the robe was one their gifts. Anyway, as most weddings, the day of was very stressful. My hair stylist had fallen through 2 days before the wedding and my bridesmaids said they would try to style my hair for me. Well, they got themselves ready and unfortunately severely miscalculated the time. By the time they started on my hair (last) I was already supposed to be ready for the photographers but definitely was no where near it. I ended up doing most of the hair style myself, and we were running behind schedule quite a bit. Once the girls started opening their gifts, the photographer told us we could slip into the robes for the pictures (which I had put on the photo checklist). My bridesmaids seemed thrilled with the robes and kept commenting on how beautiful and nice they were as we got ready; we took the pictures in the robes sitting on the hotel bed, and the day moved on.
Fast forward to when I got back from my honeymoon and my oldest sister texted me saying there’s something she needs to discuss with me in person before my photographers finalize my photos. Apparently, after I had left the reception venue with my new husband, the bridesmaids were talking about the day, and the robes came up. They each expressed to each other they felt uncomfortable but didn’t want to put a damper on my day or be the rain cloud since they thought they were the only one who felt like that. My oldest sister was nominated by the others to be the spokesperson to talk to me, and I was told they wanted me to contact my photographers and have them delete those getting ready photos, not to include them in my wedding album, and to leave any footage for it out of my wedding video. I was very shocked to hear they were so uncomfortable and months later, still cannot understand why. They felt like they were lingerie (trust me, they were nothing like it!) or too much like underclothes because they weren’t the big poofy bathrobes.. I cannot wrap my mind around it, but I felt devastated because I didn’t really have any other getting ready photos like that, not even putting my shoes on because we were so behind schedule. I had wanted pictures like that for so long I certainly wasn’t about to tell my photographers to delete part of my pictures, and there was a 1.5 second clip of us in the robes toasting a sparkling drink in my wedding highlight video. I put my highlight video on social media and got an angry text confrontation from my other sister… and then my best friend called me to let me know she wasn’t comfortable with the pictures being accessible to anyone. So I removed my highlight video from social media and am still waiting for a replacement version from my videographer, but I don’t think there’s better footage to use for our getting ready clips.. As you other brides know, wedding albums from a photographer aren’t cheap by any means. I wish so much I could feel comfortable including two of those photos in the front of my album. Since all 3 of my bridesmaids said something, I feel like I can’t, and it’s hard for me to get over for some reason… Part of me feels like I should be able to do what I want with the photos I paid for and have the album I’m paying for exactly the way I want, but I don’t want to upset anyone or make them feel disrespected. I’m sure this isn’t something they think about anymore yet eveytime I see my video and album I’m going to be thinking about the part I had to cut out.
