The Uber I’ve spent $75 AUD on speeds across the Sydney Harbour Bridge as I try to keep my eyes open, fighting the jet lag that has had me awake since 4 a.m. My destination is L’eto Bridal, an independent wedding designer based in Newport, a 45-minute drive north of my hotel in Sydney’s Surry Hills. I had been eyeing up L’eto’s designs from my home in London for months now, and when the itinerary for my trip to Australia came through and I realized I had a whole free day, I had the appointment booked within an hour.
This is not the first time I’ve spent a questionable sum of money and valuable time in an overseas destination in order to try on a wedding dress. In fact, it’s just the latest in a stream of bridal fittings across the world since I got engaged in January 2024. When it came to planning our wedding, I quickly realized the dresses on offer in London weren’t quite for me.
My key issue is that, despite an obsession with all things weddings, everything classically bridal felt completely foreign when I tried it on. I felt swallowed whole by enormous skirts and couldn’t imagine intricate lace detailing fitting my low-key, seaside Hydra wedding venue. I sought out more streamlined, modern designs at stores like The Fall Bride, Galvan, and The Own Studio but faced my second hurdle: my size. It seemed that simple, fashion-forward designs were almost exclusively designed to fit bodies much smaller than mine—slinky, silky slip dresses that were exceptionally unflattering on me. This, coupled with the fact that most dress samples were in a size 4 to 6 (a good few sizes smaller than the 10 to 12 I usually wear), meant my first few trips to bridal boutiques in London were fruitless. I was starting to feel a little desperate.
As a food and travel writer with a bank-account-draining penchant for holidays, I travel frequently for both work and play. In 2024 alone I visited 17 different countries, leaving the UK at least once every month. At the start of the year, I figured all of those places would have a few bridal stores that might help me in my efforts to find the one. So, I took my shopping on the road with me.
In Athens, I hopped in a scorching hot cab and trundled through rush-hour traffic to Costarellos in the Kolonaki neighborhood—just west of the area around the Acropolis. There, I squeezed myself into sample dresses even smaller than the ones in London. They may not have zipped up, but it was the first time I had put on a wedding dress and felt like myself. The delicately draped silk chiffon moved naturally as I walked, and the design felt special while remaining modern. I felt hopeful that I could be a bride after all.
I decided perhaps it was worth looking to the past for some inspiration, so made an appointment at Those Were the Days Bridal while visiting a friend in Edinburgh. In a room full of sartorial snapshots of love-filled days dating back as far as the Edwardian era, I swooned over a delicate silk long-sleeve 1930s dress, the art-deco detailing perfectly matching my engagement ring. Given the way bodies have changed over the years, it was a rarity to find a dress from that era in my size—and, had it not been long-sleeved, I think it would have come home with me. At the other end of the history spectrum, a slinky, cowl-neck, backless dress from the ’90s was the first time I felt truly sexy in something I tried on.
In Stockholm, I window-shopped By Malina’s chic gowns that epitomize effortless Scandi style because I was too late to get an appointment. In Buenos Aires, I made my fiancé hover outside El Camarin while I browsed vintage wedding dresses and tried and failed to work up the courage to try them on. In Ljubljana, I had grand plans to make my way to a wedding shop I had scoped out on Google Maps, but my flight was delayed and I ran out of time. At Laura Dols, a sizable vintage store in Amsterdam, I distracted my partner with the menswear and tried to sneak off to the wedding dress collection, quickly flicking through piles of ivory crochet and tulle, only to U-turn like Alan Rickman in Love Actually when he came looking for me.
In Mallorca, I finally attended the first and only bridal store with both my mum and my sister, my maid of honor. The two of them had flown from New Zealand and Australia to Spain for a family holiday, and I managed to negotiate a trip to Palma for the day to visit Cortana. Navigating gridlocked motorways and bumper-to-bumper city streets, we arrived sweaty, breathless, and 15 minutes late to my appointment. As soon as I put on the second dress, the stress of the journey slipped away; it just felt right. I looked up, and both my sister and my mum were crying. At lunch at El Camino later, we shared a bottle of cava, and I excitedly texted photos of myself in the dress to my bridesmaids, wondering if I had finally found the one.
A month later in Melbourne, I saw my mum again for a few snatched days before I flew back to London. It had been a trip almost entirely dedicated to food—I was writing about the modern face of dining in the country—and in between numerous restaurant visits, we took ourselves shopping in Armadale. Just as we were about to head home, we strolled past Rafaelle Ciuca with a sign in the window that read “walk-ins welcome.” Given the distance between us, the opportunities to try dresses on together have been few and far between, so we leaped at the chance. As we walked in, I noticed the Helix gown from New Zealand designer Hera Couture on a mannequin. The woman at the front desk informed me their brand manager happened to be in store that day for a trunk show and had some time to help me try it on. It all felt extremely serendipitous. As I stood by the mirror and she fluffed the train behind me, I finally cried for the first time since my wedding dress journey had started.
Not all of my shopping trips were successful. There were some dresses I loved but ultimately didn’t buy because I couldn’t fit the sample sizes, and I wasn’t willing to buy something without fully understanding how it would look on my body, no matter how beautiful the dress was. It’s incredible how many stores stock just one sample in a size 4—or offer just a limited selection of their stock in larger sizes. There was the odd occasion where something not fitting or a dress hugging my body in all the wrong ways got to me. But on the whole, the experience was a fairly good advocate for body neutrality, teaching me a lot about the arbitrary nature of clothing sizes – and being constantly naked in front of strangers handed me a healthy dose of confidence, too.
The dress I ultimately chose—a flowing, silk chiffon V-neck gown from Cortana that I found in Palma—felt modern but timeless, ethereal but wholly me. I didn’t feel like I was playing dress-up when I tried it on, I just felt like an elevated version of myself. It was the perfect dress to live out all my Mamma Mia wedding dreams. It may have taken almost a year, but through expanding my search around the globe and trying on an array of dresses designed for varying countries’ wedding trends, I realized it was possible to find not just one but multiple contemporary, laid-back dresses that were right for me and my body—I just had to hop on a plane to get there.