The one mistake that will make the cost of your wedding skyrocket

Thankfully, we’ve come up with a solution

Finding your dream wedding dress is no mean feat. Plus, once you eventually do find ‘the one’ as it were, the price tag is invariably the equivalent of half a month’s salary. So, unless your bridesmaids are willing to pool together to chip in as one bride recently suggested, the average wedding dress will reportedly set you back £1,400. However, new research has revealed that this dream dress is probably only worth about £360. Seemingly, by slapping the word ‘wedding’ or ‘bridal’ on a white evening gown, savvy retailers are hiking up the price.

According to Business Insider, research company Edited recently released a study claiming that stores will charge brides-to-be roughly 3.9 times more for a ‘wedding’ dress, than they would for a similar white dress. Tapping into our desire to have a Pinterest-perfect and Instagram-worthy wedding, savvy retailers are also attaching inflated prices to ‘bridesmaid’ dresses, charging 1.8 times more than identical evening dress.

The solution? We’ve scoured the high-street to find the best non-wedding, wedding dresses (from Isabel Marant Étoile to Zara), so why not invest in something you love and actually can wear again. Or, for a moment, dispel images of you gliding down the isle in your dream confection of silk and taffeta and instead picture yourself striding into the office with a sleek black suede Gucci Dionysus tucked under your arm. Costing roughly the same as a wedding dress, when you compare cost-per-wear, Gucci’s new it-bag is a basically a bargain. We know where our salary's going...