I Heart Nicole

Nicole Miller ended up being a fantastic place to start off my gown search. Despite all my fears of pushy sales people and wannabe-princess gowns, I was pleasantly surprised to find an extremely helpful staff and several gowns that were cool, looked good on me, and were affordable (I think the highest price for any of the gowns I tried on was $1800).

I had, of course, studied the Nicole Miller collection online, so I had an idea of which ones I wanted to try on. Gown #1 didn't impress me that much in the catalogue, but when I tried it on, I thought it looked great (JT agreed).

Gown #2 was also a great gown, but didn't quite feel as much like "me" as #1.

Gown #3 was surprising. I love the look of a mermaid cut, but always thought that it wasn't the most flattering to my figure. But the extremely helpful sales associate, Marissa, suggested that I give it a try, and I was surprised at how good it looked.

Gown #4: Don't let the fact that I'm not smiling in the photo fool you...I LOVE this gown (I think I just didn't realize that the shutter was firing at that exact moment).

This one was my favorite going into the appointment. I think that the photo sells it a bit short, and here's why: this particular gown was actually 2 sizes too big, so I don't think that it was quite "settling" right in the way that it would have if it had been the correct size. And there's one big problem -- this gown has actually been discontinued. Which means that I can only choose from the sizes that they currently have in stock, since they won't be making any more. And, of course, they no longer have my actual size. So, if I wanted to buy this gown, I would either have to buy one size smaller and have it let out or two sizes bigger and have it taken in (Marissa suggested that the first would probably work better, because 2 sizes down is a lot of fabric to remove). Kind of a bummer. I'm hoping that after weeks of shopping at other places, I won't decide that this was my favorite only to find out that they've sold out completely.

All in all, I tried on way more gowns than are seen here (I only took photos of the ones I thought looked best). Marissa was so great bringing me gown after gown and not minding at all that we wanted to take pictures of so many of them. Bonus points to Nicole Miler for the awesome staff!