FASHION The Alternative Bride

ONCE UPON A TIME, WEDDING DRESSes were as predictable as the happily-ever-after ending of every fairy tale. The bride would float down the aisle in a full-skirted white gown with sweetheart neckline, cinched waist, and enough beads, bows, sequins, lace, pearls, and tulle poufs to outfit a ballroom full of debutantes.

But times, it appears, have changed. Just as modern-day love is no longer given to neat little stereotypes, neither, it seems, is the modern-day wedding. With women waiting longer to marry-twenty-eight-plus is the average age, according to Bride’s magazine-many are rejecting the traditional Cinderella notion of how to dress on their wedding day. As one bridal consultant explains it, something happens to a woman as she approaches thirty: she acquires taste. The older bride is less likely to wear froufrou and will opt, instead, for something more reflective of her personal style.

“My dress before was a Prisciila of Boston-full skirt, long train, a veil,’1 says Susie Calmes, the Gazebo’s general merchandise manager, of her first wedding. “I was also nineteen years old and had seven bridesmaids.”

When she recently remarried, she and husband Jack Calmes decided on a private ceremony at the courthouse, followed by dinner at the Mansion. She had planned to wear an Isaac Mizrahi tailored white suit personally made by the designer himself but, Calmes says, “my husband has a busy travel schedule. We had decided on a date and the dress wasn’t ready in time.”

Two days before they married, she perused the store’s offerings and chose Rifat Ozbek’s ethnic-inspired ivory silk faille suit with tiny silver buttons dotting the front and Ozbek’s signature ivory-on-ivory ethnic embroidery across the back.

“The suit was not very dressy and 1 felt great when I put it on. So it was perfect,” says Calmes. “At nineteen, it took a lot of family, a lot of running around, a trousseau, china, and all that. This time, it was very easy. And I’ve worn the suit to several weddings since. So 1 guess it’s really my wedding suit now.”

Not surprisingly, even conventional bridal designers are vying for the attention of the older bride, taking many of the traditional, time-honored elements of bridal fashion-tulle, silk, and lace-and updating them with sophisticated, often sexy shapes. But it’s the couture and ready-to-wear designers who sport unique points of view on how a woman ought to look on her big day. Traditional satin-and-lace renderings-like those of Oscar de la Renta-abound, but those to the far left of traditional bear only the slightest resemblance to what we’ve always known as proper bridal attire. To wit: Claude Montana’s bodyhugging satin dress and webby jacket; Carmelo Pomodoro’s white denim-and-organza motorcycle jacket, chiffon camisole, and ottoman skirt; the barely-there strapless mini by Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis; and Isaac Mizrahi’s peau de soie backless shirtwaist dress.

Such fashion-forward interpretations of bridal virtue, of course, make etiquette experts positively bristle. Still grappling with the idea of so-called alternative weddings and brides “who marry more than once,” as Letitia Baldrige calls them, the pros offer little advice beyond suggesting they avoid white (it symbolizes “purity” and virginity) in favor of off-white, skip the long gown and sweeping train, and forget the veil.

“There was no way I was going to have a big dress with my head wrapped up in flowers. That’s not my style,” says Candace Krause, former publisher of Dallas-Fort Worth Home & Garden. She first spotted her wedding dress thumbing not through Bride’s, that by-the-textbook arbiter of all that’s correct for the couple-to-be, but W. And, as any wedding dress should, the two-piece tea-length Oscar de la Renta dress she chose conveyed the spirit of her and husband Jimmy’s wedding: an intimate gathering at the Swiss Avenue home of a friend.

For these women, the issue isn’t about shunning tradition, but following instincts. Ginger Reeder, merchandise director at Horchow, exchanged vows with husband Jack Vroom in a grove of trees at Conne-mara, the nature conservancy in McKinney. Wanting “something simple” for the outdoor ceremony last fall, she called on her friend, Dallas designer Bea Harper.

Heeding Reeder’s one request-’I don’t want to look like a Barbie doll’-Harper came up with a sophisticated two-piece dress that paired an ivory lace tunic (embellished with seed pearls) with an ankle-length silk organza skirt that was worn over layers of tulle and silk sheathing to add fullness.

“As it was, everything that happened had our signature on it,” she says. “If I had gotten married eight years ago, my mother would’ve planned it.”

Having the wedding-and the dress-she wants is one advantage to being an older bride. Given the matrimonial statute of limitations that seems to automatically kick in once a woman reaches thirty, the older bride is likely to pay for the big day herself. And she doesn’t have to act out anyone’s wedding dream but her own.