This week I propose a toast to Asda and its 60-quid wedding dresses. What splendid good sense, eh? Anyone who has ever been to a wedding must know that spending much more than double figures on a bridal frock is preposterous. It might have cost £15,000, been hand-stitched by cherubims and sprinkled in fairydust, but the fact is that your guests will be too pissed on free champagne to notice. The men will only be interested in whether it shows any cleavage. The women will only be interested in whether it makes you look fat. Asda is to be congratulated for keeping matters in perspective.
Alas, the same cannot be said of its timing. What on earth made it decide to launch its new collection on the most unromantic day of the year, namely Valentine’s Day? Doesn’t it realise that nothing aligning itself with Valentine’s Day can ever be taken seriously? It is a custard pie burlesque of romance when love means buying your wife Vera a pair of furry handcuffs and a 100 per cent polyester peephole bra. It is a day for restaurants to rack up prices by renaming their bog-standard menu “The Food of Love” and serving up the same old chocolate pudding as “noisettes d’Aphrodite”.
I hate to seem cynical but people who buy in to the commercial parody of Valentine’s remind me of farm stock mating to order. What kind of man needs to wait for Hallmark cards to give the nod before he can ask his girlfriend to marry him? And how can she possibly accept when he does so by means of a stuffed bear wearing a Be Mine T-shirt?
It’s a pity that Asda has gone down the insipid VD route – but at least their bridal range remains a perfect symbol for our times. In the age of throwaway marriage, what more apt than a throwaway wedding dress? Ditto its £19 wedding rings: much less galling when you chuck it back in your husband’s face three years later. It’s easy for me to be flip; I’m not married. But I’d have no objection to a budget wedding dress because to me most bridal frocks look pretty tacky anyway, what with all that netting and bows. Even the simple ones can belie their expensiveness. Remember the Carolina Herrera frock that Renée Zellweger wore to get married on a beach? It looked to me like it had been run up by the machinists in Mike Baldwin’s factory. Five months later the marriage collapsed. Bet she wishes she’d gone to Asda.
The posher readers among you may now be calling me a philistine and they might be right. But since the average wedding dress now costs £826 and it’s something you only wear once I’d sooner spend the money on five pairs of designer jeans.
Advertisement
Remember, there’s only one woman who ever got value for money out of her wedding dress. Her name was Miss Havisham.