The growing popularity of the bridesmaid robe

These 'getting-ready' garments are practical, affordable, and look great in Instagram photos. Photo / 123RF

A decade ago, Charlotte Hale was in search of a clever marketing hook for her new clothing business, Plum Pretty Sugar, which manufactured and sold robes and other leisure wear for women.

"You wear a robe to go to bed at night," she thought. "You wear a robe to get ready. Who gets ready in a robe?" Then it hit her: bridal parties, of course.

In the past several years, the "bridesmaid robe," now part of the "getting-ready" retail category that Hale helped pioneer, has grown in popularity. On the e-commerce website Etsy, there have been more than 424,000 searches for bridesmaid's robes conducted in the past three months alone, according to the site.

The garment's profile has also been raised by social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. Bridal parties can often be found posing for photos in short, silky robes — pastel or floral, bedazzled or monogrammed — usually holding glasses of Champagne.

Jenneh Bockari, 33, a Los Angeles nurse who got married last February, says she discovered Plum Pretty Sugar on Instagram. "I actually had my girls' getting-ready robes picked out before I had their dresses picked out," she said.

Today bridesmaid robes are readily available through many major retailers. Anthropologie's bridal label, BHLDN, began carrying Hale's brand in 2015. Victoria's Secret was an early seller of bride robes before the category expanded to the wedding party and places like David's Bridal. Shopping sites like Amazon and AliExpress also carry them.

For brides, the robes are a gift to give their bridesmaids that likely won't be tossed after the wedding. And they're generally affordable.

Bockari was the last person in her group of friends to get married, and so she was a seasoned bridesmaid by the time she walked down the aisle. "When I was planning my wedding, I was going through some of the things that I enjoyed or did not enjoy about being a bridesmaid," she said. She wanted her attendants "to be in something comfortable and that they felt good in for our pictures beforehand."

Heather Moore Stolfa, a 24-year-old performer at the Silver Dollar City theme park in Branson, Missouri, surprised her bridal party with monogrammed robes from Etsy. She hung each on a rack in the Whitehall mansion in Louisville, Kentucky, where she was married in June 2018. "They got to come in and see them — they loved them," she said, adding that they also made for great group photographs.

For Ellen Begley Weaver, 28, a strategic account executive from Richmond, Virginia, the robes were pure function at her June 2017 wedding in Atlanta. She had gifted her bridesmaid hair styling and makeup, she said, "and I was thinking about how logistically that's not really an easy thing to do when you have to have a T-shirt that you pull up over your head."

The bridesmaid robe doesn't just present a new fashion category and gift option for the grateful bride. It also created a new style of photograph.

"In my world, it's the 'robe shot,' " said Austin Gros, a Nashville, Tennessee-based photographer. "I've done it just sitting on a couch. I've done all the girls kind of propped on the bed. I've done it standing in front of a window. I get shots of the rings, the dress, the bride in hair and makeup, and if there's matching robes, we get the robe shot."

Hannah Yoest, a photographer who works in Washington, Virginia and New York, says that a group robe picture was the only shot that the bride specifically requested at the first wedding she shot back in 2015. "For photographs, they're a nice uniform and lower the risk of candid pictures looking overly casual," she said. "When else are they going to get that photo?"

The popularity of wedding robes enabled Rachel and Casey Adams to turn their Etsy side gig into a full-time business from their home just outside Atlanta. After ordering an embroidery machine and offering custom monograms, they made so many sales at the beginning of 2018 that they had to shut down the store for a couple of months to fulfill them.

Adams frames the trend with a sports metaphor: "You're going forth as a unit," he said, "When you go to a baseball game, everyone's wearing their team's colors."

Lately, the couple said they have been fielding more requests for robes appropriate to bridesmen.

The money spent in pursuit of the right props for the perfect social media post can easily add up, but fans of the bridesmaid robe emphasise its heirloom potential, not to mention practicality.

Since getting married, Begley Weaver of Virginia has acquired two bridesmaid robes from other weddings, both of which she now regularly uses. "If one's in the laundry, I have another one," she said. "It's a nice thing to wear rather than a towel around an Airbnb."

Bockari said that a member of her wedding party shared that she wore her bridesmaid robe when she was going through in vitro fertilisation. "Whenever she was having a bad time with the side effects, she would put the robe on and that just made my heart so happy that it meant so much to her," she said.

One of the favorite parts of Hale's job is hearing from customers who say: "I wore your robe to get married in. I wore your robe to give birth in. And you have been with me throughout some of the most important moments in my life."

"I'm going to cry," she said.

Written by: Daisy Alioto

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