Here comes the bride!

A friend of a friend has a daughter who is getting married next Labor Day and the hunt for the wedding dress in on! The budget for the gown? A whopping $5,000!

And since the first day of this shopping adventure coincided with the weekend I spent with my divorced sister, who spent a good portion of our time together picking my ex-CPA brain to help her re-group financially and ensure that she’ll be able to retire someday, well, it got me thinking…

Maybe every bride should consider slashing her wedding gown budget in half and investing the other half in a nice interest-bearing account that compounds daily.

Then, on her 25th wedding anniversary, she can celebrate her years of wedded bliss by buying herself something nice — like a Birkin bag.

But what if her marriage comes to a screeching halt midway to that 25th anniversary, you may ask. Well, then she could turn to her little nest egg to fund a trip to a tropical isle to drown her sorrows (and perhaps meet Husband #2 like that lucky lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love.)

Of course, another option is simply to think outside the wedding gown box.

For instance, a business colleague recently confessed that his bride-to-be is renting her wedding dress when they marry next June. Sounds like a good idea, don’t you think?

Or, you could combine something old and something new and create your own design by grabbing today’s VPOD and attaching it to a lovely and classic sheath dress.

This antique lace train wedding train was handmade in the early part of the century and features floral Brussels bobbin lace with wide Duchesse lace borders.

It’s an exquisite find for a betrothed vintage fashionista!

Available at Vintage Textile.

Though this photo is about the shoes, (let us not forget to show our reverence to the pretty vintage shoes here) I really want to talk about what’s adorning these legs.

Flashy hosiery is timeless. Any of these could be worn today and spectators would believe that they’re brand new (though they are all probably being held up by garters and the fabric lacks as much stretch as today’s tights).

Did you know…

It wasn’t until the 40’s/50’s that women in dance and theater began sewing their stockings to their briefs that the idea for pantyhose was born, and it took till the 60’s for them to become near as easy to wear as they are today.

Despite all the heavy machinery necessary to hold these babies up, I would proudly sport any of them!

Oh, how I love leg adornment!

Guest Post by Gilded Gypsy with a shout-out to Off Broadway.

ABC News reports that there are 84,000 centenarians living in the United States—that’s folks who have reached the ripe ol’ age of 100 years or more. And when I think of all the changes they’ve seen in their lifetimes, I often wonder if they feel like they’ve been characters living in a science fiction novel.

After all, in the past 100 years they’ve witnessed the birth of televisions, cell phones, microwaves, computers, and yes, even sliced bread!

But even though it’s easy to appreciate and marvel at all our new-fangled electronics, I find it just as easy to stand in awe of the handmade treasures crafted hundreds of years ago.

And while I hope I can throw a 100th Birthday Bash for someone I know someday, in the meantime I’ll settle for doing a little happy dance every time I find a pristine antique garment like today’s VPOD.

This exquisite Battenberg lace jacket with bell sleeves hails from around 1910 and has no rips or stains—a very rare occurrence in lace garments of this age. And while it’s most definitely yesteryear, it also has plenty of modern appeal.

And that makes it a wonderful antique find for a vintage fashionista!

Available at Timeless Vixen.

(To receive the VPOD via email with detailed size, price and purchase information, sign up for my growing email mailing list here. Your information will never be sold or shared and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.)

If you’re lucky enough to be the recipient of an unexpected financial windfall of, ooooh, let’s say, $9,000, any self-respecting financial advisor would strongly urge you to act sensibly and invest your riches in a stock market index fund or a blue-chip stock with a solid record of dividends.

I’ve never once heard Suze Orman or any other financial whiz suggest that you splurge on something outrageously rare, beautiful and stunning like today’s VPOD. But that’s what I’d want to do.

This vintage 1910′s silk tunic by Madeleine Cheruit is simply exquisite. Trained in the 1880s at the couture house of Raudnitz, in Paris, Madeleine Cheruit created for many aristocratic clients and her work is highly regarded alongside the likes of Vionnet, Lanvin and Worth.

In this piece, she transforms a simple design from ordinary to extraordinary with an asymmetric closure and outstanding embroidery and beadwork. There’s no machine sewing here! Every bead, every sequin, every stitch would have been done by hand.

It’s still in very good condition one hundred years later and it’s provenance is known. That’s a picture of the garment’s first owner taken in the 1920s.

What an investment-worthy find for a vintage fashionista!

Available from Kakkoii Mono.

(To receive the VPOD via email with detailed size, price and purchase information, sign up for my growing email mailing list here. Your information will never be sold or shared and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.)

GET READY, GET SET, BID!!!

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