Okay, back to the really important stuff: my youngest sister is getting married in February, and I have decided to make the journey to the States to join her for her big, fat Greek wedding--yay! The only problem is this will be a formal affair in the middle of winter in Utah and all my quote-unquote formal dresses are short, most with short sleeves--boo!
So I have been thinking about how to solve this problem for the past little while. A seemingly easy solution was Plan #1: order a bunch of formal dresses to be sent to my parents' house (my home base), try them on when I get there, and then return what doesn't work. Of course, this plan only functions when you have unlimited returns, since I would need to order them fairly far in advance to make sure they got there in time. Thank goodness for Macys.com and their generous return policy! More importantly, this plan also leaves me no time to get any of the dresses altered, which might not be necessary but probably would be since I am not so tall. This plan also means I have to float a big charge on my credit card until I return the dresses that don't fit AND, most concerning of all, could still result in my not finding a dress that fits correctly. So, not the best plan.
Plan #2 would be to send a bunch of dresses here, try them on and have the winning designs altered here, and return the rest. However, this plan has even more problems: first, there is no reliable way to ship things back to the US from Qatar at present. Second, every package we get here, as I have already explained, means that we pay by weight to pick it up, and formal dresses are, as a rule, very heavy. Three, trying to take the returns back with me to be sent from there requires some shipping time calculations that are already making my head spin: determine the shipping time to our New York address (a total crap shoot unless we order via Amazon), add on at least 5 more days to get it to Qatar, make sure it gets here in time for both alterations (at least a week) AND with enough time to get back to the States via plane within the return window...virtually impossible!
Plan #3 was very short-lived: there are many tailors here who will copy any garment you want so I thought I might borrow a dress from someone or take one of my shorter formals and ask them to modify the pattern slightly and make me a dress from scratch. This plan would require me to get all the necessary materials myself (fabric, lining, interface, zippers, buttons, etc.) and take all of that to the tailor along with my example piece, but I felt confident I could do that after a few visits to the fabric souq. However, a long-time resident here counseled me against this plan, saying that she had had formal dresses made here before and, in her experience, the results hadn't been exactly what she had wanted in the end. I decided I would rather find a tailor I liked and have he or she make me some less important pieces before I ran right into commissioning formal gowns on spec!
Which led me to plan #4: go dress shopping in Qatar. In theory, this was a great idea. Shopping for modest formals (no cleavage, no open backs, sleeves of some kind, long, but hopefully not too matronly) should be a no-brainer in a Muslim country, right? I have seen formals all over the malls (people really, really like to dress up here), many of which looked like something that might work for me, so I started my search with high hopes. Sadly, however, it turned out that dress shopping here was only slightly less horrible than shoe shopping. Problems occurred at all points in the process: It turns out that a huge percentage of the seemingly modest dresses I had been noticing were in fact covered in unlined, sheer material in all sorts of revealing places. And many of the linings were basically the equivalent of tube tops over mini-skirts and therefore completely inadequate. The one bright spot here was that all the stores assured me they would alter the dresses to my tastes for free, as long as I brought in the lining fabric needed myself. Umm, okay...I can do that! And, of course, my size was either the largest they carried in the store or completely at odds with the posted sizes, which meant I either had very few options to try on in one store or I had to try on loads of dresses in another store while I tried to determine what my size was in their numbers. Then there were the prices. I tried on a very, very lovely gray silk dress that would have required just a bit more lining at the bust-line, but then I noticed that the dress cost 5000QR, or $1373USD. Gulp! That's more than my wedding dress cost...by a LOT! No thank you! In the end, after visiting many, many shops, I did finally find a floor length gown, black lace over a nude lining, that fit like a glove and would only need the tiniest bit of alteration on the sleeves (I'm going to have them shortened to elbow length to lighten the dress up a bit and make is a tad more youthful, and then line them with cap sleeves). And where did I find this dress? Oh, Marks and Spencer, of course, the most Western department store in all of Qatar. It's like finding my dress off the rack at Dillards or Nordstroms in the States. I'm so (not) posh!
Oh look, I found a picture of the dress (according to the website, this dress is only available online...and secretly on the rack in Qatar, apparently!):
At least when shopping in M&S, I didn't feel like my size was so off the charts gargantuan but more middle of the road. Shopping in Doha is such an adventure, an adventure that this week made me want to go the gym pronto! But I was also pretty happy I did manage to find something in the end. It's the small victories around here, people! We have to celebrate the small stuff!
So I have been thinking about how to solve this problem for the past little while. A seemingly easy solution was Plan #1: order a bunch of formal dresses to be sent to my parents' house (my home base), try them on when I get there, and then return what doesn't work. Of course, this plan only functions when you have unlimited returns, since I would need to order them fairly far in advance to make sure they got there in time. Thank goodness for Macys.com and their generous return policy! More importantly, this plan also leaves me no time to get any of the dresses altered, which might not be necessary but probably would be since I am not so tall. This plan also means I have to float a big charge on my credit card until I return the dresses that don't fit AND, most concerning of all, could still result in my not finding a dress that fits correctly. So, not the best plan.
Plan #2 would be to send a bunch of dresses here, try them on and have the winning designs altered here, and return the rest. However, this plan has even more problems: first, there is no reliable way to ship things back to the US from Qatar at present. Second, every package we get here, as I have already explained, means that we pay by weight to pick it up, and formal dresses are, as a rule, very heavy. Three, trying to take the returns back with me to be sent from there requires some shipping time calculations that are already making my head spin: determine the shipping time to our New York address (a total crap shoot unless we order via Amazon), add on at least 5 more days to get it to Qatar, make sure it gets here in time for both alterations (at least a week) AND with enough time to get back to the States via plane within the return window...virtually impossible!
Plan #3 was very short-lived: there are many tailors here who will copy any garment you want so I thought I might borrow a dress from someone or take one of my shorter formals and ask them to modify the pattern slightly and make me a dress from scratch. This plan would require me to get all the necessary materials myself (fabric, lining, interface, zippers, buttons, etc.) and take all of that to the tailor along with my example piece, but I felt confident I could do that after a few visits to the fabric souq. However, a long-time resident here counseled me against this plan, saying that she had had formal dresses made here before and, in her experience, the results hadn't been exactly what she had wanted in the end. I decided I would rather find a tailor I liked and have he or she make me some less important pieces before I ran right into commissioning formal gowns on spec!
Which led me to plan #4: go dress shopping in Qatar. In theory, this was a great idea. Shopping for modest formals (no cleavage, no open backs, sleeves of some kind, long, but hopefully not too matronly) should be a no-brainer in a Muslim country, right? I have seen formals all over the malls (people really, really like to dress up here), many of which looked like something that might work for me, so I started my search with high hopes. Sadly, however, it turned out that dress shopping here was only slightly less horrible than shoe shopping. Problems occurred at all points in the process: It turns out that a huge percentage of the seemingly modest dresses I had been noticing were in fact covered in unlined, sheer material in all sorts of revealing places. And many of the linings were basically the equivalent of tube tops over mini-skirts and therefore completely inadequate. The one bright spot here was that all the stores assured me they would alter the dresses to my tastes for free, as long as I brought in the lining fabric needed myself. Umm, okay...I can do that! And, of course, my size was either the largest they carried in the store or completely at odds with the posted sizes, which meant I either had very few options to try on in one store or I had to try on loads of dresses in another store while I tried to determine what my size was in their numbers. Then there were the prices. I tried on a very, very lovely gray silk dress that would have required just a bit more lining at the bust-line, but then I noticed that the dress cost 5000QR, or $1373USD. Gulp! That's more than my wedding dress cost...by a LOT! No thank you! In the end, after visiting many, many shops, I did finally find a floor length gown, black lace over a nude lining, that fit like a glove and would only need the tiniest bit of alteration on the sleeves (I'm going to have them shortened to elbow length to lighten the dress up a bit and make is a tad more youthful, and then line them with cap sleeves). And where did I find this dress? Oh, Marks and Spencer, of course, the most Western department store in all of Qatar. It's like finding my dress off the rack at Dillards or Nordstroms in the States. I'm so (not) posh!
Oh look, I found a picture of the dress (according to the website, this dress is only available online...and secretly on the rack in Qatar, apparently!):
At least when shopping in M&S, I didn't feel like my size was so off the charts gargantuan but more middle of the road. Shopping in Doha is such an adventure, an adventure that this week made me want to go the gym pronto! But I was also pretty happy I did manage to find something in the end. It's the small victories around here, people! We have to celebrate the small stuff!
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