I bought my dream wedding dress at a thrift shop and it was perfect

Raleigh Lawrence
3 min readMar 20, 2023

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I thought I knew exactly what I wanted in a wedding dress. I had found it online and printed out the photo and excitedly drove 2 hours to the shop it was in near the city. I tried it on and hated it.

Thomas AE

It all started when I got engaged and started planning my wedding. I knew I wanted something special and unique that would reflect my personal style, and I had an entire Pinterest board that showed each and every detail of the entire day. When I thought I found the one, but hated the way it looked on me I went on a frenzy of trying on a bunch of others outside my budget.

That was a giant mistake. I fell in love with one but it was nearly two thousand dollars over my budget. It was a beautiful dress but there was no way I was about to spend that kind of fortune on a dress that I would only wear once. So, I decided to check out some local thrift shops to see if I could find something that would fit the bill.

That’s when I stumbled upon this little shop in downtown Troy. The moment I walked in, I knew I had hit the jackpot. The shop was filled with racks and racks of beautiful used dresses, and the owner was a friendly woman who was more than happy to help me find something I loved.

Troy actually came in on this list of most expensive cities to buy a wedding dress in the US but I was able to score the deal of a lifetime. After browsing through the racks for a while, I found a few dresses that caught my eye. I tried them on, and while they were all beautiful, there was one in particular that stood out to me. It was a gorgeous ivory lace dress with a sweetheart neckline and a full skirt that flowed beautifully when I twirled around. As soon as I slipped it on, I knew it was the one. It fit me perfectly and it was only a fraction of the cost of a new designer dress.

You can see where in the US people are spending on the most on wedding dresses, with the average on the high side over 2k in states like Hawaii, New York, and California. Mississippi and Texas are the states where people spend the least on wedding dresses at an average of around $1,200.

My dress cost me $250 and in the end, my wedding day was everything I had dreamed of and more. Even though I fell in love with a dress I had never seen, and then one way over my budget, my thrifted dress was the perfect addition to my special day. It just goes to show that sometimes the best things can be found in the most unexpected places.

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