Almost Nobody Prices the Alterations

Your gown arrives at the shop and somebody rings to tell you. That is one of the good phone calls. You go in, you put it on, and for the first time it is your dress, not a sample with clips down the back.

Then a woman kneels beside you with pins in her mouth, works her way round the hem, stands up and tells you what it needs. A hem taken up. A bustle so you can dance in it. Something let out through the bust, or taken in, depending on the year you have had. And somewhere in the next few minutes you find out what it costs.

Not before. Not when you chose the gown, not when you paid the deposit, not on the page where the price was printed. Then, up on a box, with the hem already pinned.

Almost nobody puts that number on a page. Eight shops here do, and what they publish tells you the size of the bill months before anybody stands on a box.

What gets a number and what does not

Of the 173 bridal dress stores in this directory, 77 name alterations among the services they publish, and 51 of those say the sewing is done in house. None of this is hidden work. Somebody in the back room has a machine, thirty years of practice and a diary that fills in October.

Thirty three of the 173 publish a dollar figure attached to an appointment: a booking fee, a Saturday surcharge, a charge for a third visit. Eight publish one for the alterations. Four times as many shops will put a price on your attendance as will put one on making the gown fit.

There is a reason for that, and it is a good one. A fitting cannot be quoted before somebody has seen the dress on the body. A hem on a five layer skirt is not a hem on a slip, and the woman doing the work has to see the seam allowance before she knows whether there is any. Guess high down the phone and you lose the bride. Guess low and you lose the afternoon.

Eight of them do it anyway.

What one price list gives away

One is a Toowoomba studio that sells no dresses at all. It takes the gown you own and makes it yours, and it publishes the parts. A single layer hem is $240. Five layers is about $600. An eight layer hem with a lace edge and horsehair braid is about $900. A one point bustle starts at $119, a multi point one from $330.

Read that and it stops being a mystery and becomes a quote for labour. The skirt has eight layers and somebody finishes every one of them by hand, on her knees, in an afternoon she cannot sell twice. Nothing there is a charge for the word wedding. It is arithmetic about layers.

The same studio publishes what the whole job usually comes to: most brides spend $1,200 to $2,600, across two to five fittings. Sit with that. A tailoring house at Ballina, on the New South Wales north coast, publishes its two wedding gowns at $1,100 and $1,800. At the top of that band the sewing costs more than either dress.

Which is not a scandal. It is somebody's afternoons, several of them, on a dress that has to be right the first time it is worn. What it should not be is the first you have heard of it.

Why it is always a hem and a bustle

Here is the part that explains all of it, and one Central Coast showroom puts it in a line: a hem, a bustle and a nip at the bust are the usual alterations, because gowns are ordered to the nearest chart size and fitted to the waist.

Read that twice, because it is the whole thing. Your gown was not made for you. It was made to a size on a designer's chart, the one closest to your measurements, and the waist is the measurement they get right, because the waist is the hardest place to move a dress once it is built. The hem is left long, because a chart has no idea how tall you are or what you will have on your feet. The bust is a compromise struck between thousands of women, and you are one woman.

That is not a fault in the dress, and certainly not in you. It is what made to order means, and 123 of the 173 stores here sell that way.

Even a Riverina atelier that drafts every gown to the bride says so.

All the gowns we make are custom made and designed to your measurements. Although we take a lot of measurements, your dress will still need slight alterations. For example, hem or straps.

If a dress drawn around your own body still needs a hem, one ordered off a chart was never going to escape one. So a label whose gowns run $285 to $989 tells brides to allow room in the budget for adjustments. That is honest, and it is not a number. It is where 165 of the 173 stores here stop.

The workroom has a diary of its own

A published alterations page hands you a calendar as well as a price, and the calendar belongs to whoever does the sewing. One Lake Macquarie studio wants you booked the day the dress is bought, with a first fitting ten weeks out. A seamstress at Eleebana, on the same lake, asks for eight weeks, and longer from August to November and from March to May, because that is when everybody gets married. Inside five weeks there is a $200 rush fee, if she can take you at all.

That fee is not a fine. It is what it costs to move somebody else down the list in the busiest months, and because she publishes it you can plan around it.

She also tells brides who bought their gown elsewhere to check she has their date free before they book, and that is the sentence to read twice. If your shop sends its alterations out, do not assume anybody is holding a Saturday in October for you. The gown is on order, the venue is booked, the invitations are at the printer, and the one appointment that decides whether any of it fits is the only thing in the whole plan nobody has written down. You are the one who has to.

Ask in the chair, not on the box

A bride who spends $1,500 having a gown she loves made to fit her has not been ripped off. She has bought hours of skilled work on the one garment that has to hold up from every angle in front of everyone she knows. The problem is never the price. It is finding it out on a box, three months out, when the gown is paid for and cannot go back.

So ask in the chair, at the first appointment, before you have fallen in love with anything. Not what alterations will cost, because nobody can tell you that yet. Ask what the last three brides in a gown like this one paid to have theirs altered. A shop can answer that, because the woman who did the sewing is four metres away, or she is the one they send their brides to. Write the number down and add it to the price of the gown. The two together are the price of the dress.

Then, three months out, when she stands up with the pins still in her mouth and tells you what it needs, the only thing left to do is look in the mirror.