(Closed) Who knows about fabric? Advise me, please!

• ddw
• 11 years ago

Okay, let me start by being really honest – my dress budget? it’s tiny. Like… $400 including alterations kind of tiny. And I’m hoping to go lower than that. *hoping*

I tried on dresses today, for the first time. [Maybe I’ll post pictures another time; right now I’m too emotionally spent from 6 1/2 hours of dress shopping with my mom – 3 shops, and no, we don’t usually get along well, and no, I didn’t really find anything I loved.]

At David’s Bridal, the first place we went, there seemed to be two types of fabric. Both were listed as Polyster inside the dresses, but according to their website, the two are “Faile” and “Satin”. Satin, I’ve heard of. It’s soft, it’s thick, it feels like I expected dresses to feel. Faile though… the stuff reminds me of a picnic table cloth, minus the weird fuzzy underside that sticks to everything.

So my question is, what’s the deal with this faile stuff? Is it as cheapy as I’m assuming? Or just different from what I expected?

Has anyone bought a dress in it? I loved the shillouette of two of the dresses I tried on, but couldn’t get over feeling that they were cheap because of the material. Will it wrinkle like crazy? Or photograph weird? I’m hesistant, even though one dress was in my price range (on sale in store only), if I can find someone (like my GRANDMA) to do alterations for free, haha.

Okay, pics of the two dresses in question (not on me, sorry; later, I promise):

Style ES90808 by Galina

[attachment=636285,82853]

Style WG9854

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• ddw
• 11 years ago

@Brew – it felt cheap to you too? 

Do you think it LOOKS cheap or just FEELS cheap? Because no one is going to be man handling my dress 😉 but it’s just not soft like the satin!

• ddw
• 11 years ago

@Zippy – I didn’t see your comment earlier, that’s good to hear. Most of the ‘nicer’ dresses I tried on (at shops other than DB) seemed to be Satin. I don’t think I tried any Faile on at other shops – do you think that was a fluke?

anybody else have experience with Faile???

• ddw
• 11 years ago

@olive – woah! That info is awesome! Thanks for explaining 🙂 that makes sense, and explains why the tags all said Polyester, even though the website says they’re Satin or Faile.

I’ve thought a lot about having a dress made in China; my worry is that I’ve had so many other clothes made there before, and it’s so hit or miss if they’re good or not. Most of the online dresses you can buy are made within a hundred miles of each other, and that area is thousands of miles from me. 🙂 So I’d either have to take the chance of doing it by mail, or else have it done by a tailor who has never done an American style wedding gown before, and knows next to nothing about American wedding traditions. My Chinese is good, but not great, and few people in my city speak English, haha.

Yeah, I’ve thought a lot about getting it made in China; I’m still on the fence.