Recently new brides-to-be are charged up to £50 solely to get an appointment with a dress fitter for their special day.

With an average UK wedding now costing £20,000 - with £1,000 of that being spent on the bride’s outfit -  weddings are getting more and more expensive. Several boutiques around the country have introduced charges to scare away time wasters who visit shops to look at and try on wedding dresses without any intention of buying one.

Shops hope to put an end to the practice of women trying on dozens of dresses in shops before finding “the one”, as the cost becomes prohibitive.

The charges, called “appointment fees”, “consultation fees” and ” deposits” are between £25 and £50. A coulpe of boutiques refund the money to brides after they agree to buy a dress.

“Quite a few shops have started to charge now, and I can see why retailers are doing it. Charging for an appointment forces a bride to think about whether or not she is serious about buying a dress from that particular designer,” said Deborah Joseph, editor of Brides magazine. “The first fitting can take an hour, and a woman will probably try on six different styles of dress.”

Well-known brand names including Caroline Castiglione,
Phillipa Lepley and My Lady have started charging. A lot of the top-end boutiques have banned
cameras as well so women photographing expensive dresses cannot have cut-price copies made.
Some of the brands have been accused of snobbery, by effectively closing their doors to the
less well off.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Wedding dresses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.