So You're EnGAYged, a LGBT wedding blog

A long time ago I wrote on here  my struggles to decide what to wear for the big day (What to Wear to A Wedding and What I Dont WANNA!). I discussed how for me personally Ive never felt very dapper in a tux and that while suits are wonderful they still don’t really feel like “me”. This issue is something my partner Joey deals with too. Lets face it we aren’t exactly the fashion forward high maintenance kind of gay men, were more like… well slobs. Adorable slobs, but slobs none the less. This made picking outfits especially hard since we both definitely want to look our best but we don’t want to feel like we are wearing someone else’s skin for the day.

For months now we’ve bounced around various ideas about what to wear but we kept coming back towards comfort over style. One day last week I asked Joey to go online and just look at various pictures of grooms he thought were wearing cool clothes and save the pictures he liked and we would pick and choose elements  to make up his outfit. Sounded simple right? Well we sort of ran into the same problems where all we were seeing were tuxedos and suits which granted look great on some men… just not us. So I told him to imagine he was going to a really cool event that he wanted to look awesome for and to create that outfit instead. BINGO.

There are so many hang ups about what Grooms (and Brides) are supposed to wear that we were both looking at the wrong kind of clothing, he created a collage with bowties, comfy linen pants, punk rock pins, and patterned button ups. Using the bits and pieces he picked I was able to assemble a mock up of an outfit that was wearable and fashionable. When I saw his outfit it inspired my own which was is similar but still more “me”. When I showed him the outfit concept he was so excited, we both were, for the first time in regards to wedding clothes.

Once they are ordered I’ll be sure to write a part 3 with real photos but all in all, we’ve finally found them.

Success!  We found a suit. An absolutely amazing suit.

I can’t say enough awesome things about the store where we finally found the right one. Brown’s in Toronto specializes in small sizes for men - formal, business, and casual.  They had everything you could ever want, and in all the perfect sizes.  AND, they were so awesome to work with.  I first called them ahead of time to ask if they, or any of their staff, had experience fitting women for their suits and was so pleased to hear that they do it “all the time” and that they have “lot’s of women customers”!  It was such a relief to know we could work with professionals who knew what they were doing in fitting men’s suits for women.

The fantastic guy who helped us out nailed it right off the bat.  He pulled out this awesome charcoal-grey 3-piece Keneth Cole suit with a slight stripped sheen to it… done and done.  Bek tried on a couple others but this one was the clear winner.  It fit great, but we’re getting it tailored to perfection.

Bek loves it, I love it… how could you not?!?  The vest makes me especially happy!  I have to admit I have a bit of a crush on her in this suit.

So, the next step is a shirt and tie.  Being pretty picky about the shirt (even though we’re just looking for white), while being very wishy-washy on what exactly to look for in a tie.  So it may be a while before the last few pieces of this outfit get put together.  But the big job has been done, and we couldn’t be happier!

For the purposes of our wedding, we like to identify ourselves not as two brides, not as a bride and groom, but as a Suit-Person and a Meringue-Person.  I’m the Meringue-Person (which is admittedly the more fun moniker), and Bek is the Suit-Person.  *This is a bit of a riff on our ongoing mockery of bathroom signs, identifying the bathrooms as designated for pant-people and skirt-people.  Gendered bathroom symbols suck.*

Anyway, Meringue-Person has already found her meringue dress, and will be blissfully shrouded in white fluff.  Pant-Person has had a bit more trouble.  Actually, we only just started looking for the suit itself – till now it’s just been a lot of anxiety.

The Woman’s Suit vs The Man’s Suit was the big the dilemma, and Bek has gone back and forth on this a hundred times over during the planning… often several times in the course of 15 minutes.  So we decided we would tackle the issue by just casting a wide net, and do a preliminary scouting that included both the women’s and men’s sections of a department store.  Just to kind of break the ice and give us some ideas.

The women’s suits sucked.  Don’t get me wrong, lots of women’s suits DON’T suck, but the ones we looked at that day did.  I mean really sucked.  It’s always so frustrating that there isn’t a non-dress option for women that is of a high-level of formality.  So that meant it was time to try out the men’s section.

Bek wears men’s clothes pretty much exclusively, but has never bought a man’s suit before.  According to Bek, what was intimidating was not knowing what to ask for… or not even knowing what needed to be known!  Getting up the nerve to ask a salesperson in menswear about a suit for a woman can be tough enough, but it seemed to be compounded by not being able to seem informed and casual about it.  So, after several tours around the section and literally running away from the kindly gentlemen who was trying to help us, the bullet was bitten.

And of course, he was totally great – didn’t bat an eye at our situation or any of our questions, and was incredibly helpful.  He told us everything we needed to know, needed to look for, needed to ask, and he explained the whole process.  It was so nice.  Unfortunately, because they carry very few smaller sizes, they weren’t able to get us what we needed, but we at least had the tools which meant Bek had a LOT more confidence.

So, armed with our newly acquired arsenal of menswear suit-fitting savvy, and a more confident attitude, we tore that mall UP!  We hit just about every store, talked to so many sales people, and tried on lots of stuff.  And everyone was awesome.  Not a single bad experience.  The stores we tried didn’t really carry anything of the quality we were looking for, which we knew going in, but it was a good way for Bek to get comfortable trying stuff on.

It’s tough to find the right size without going totally custom, which isn’t totally out of the question for us, but I’m eyeing a specialty store in our city that specializes in clothing for shorter men.  All they stock is smaller sizes!  We’re going to hit there next, and I think it might do the trick for us.

So, ideally this week we’ll have had a another successful run at the suit shopping business.  AND I’ve got the go-ahead to snap some pictures this time.  So in Part 2 there might actually be some super-hot pictures of my super-hot Suit-Person!  It would be awesome if the number of “parts” in this series were kept to a minimum, because we’re running out of time and I hope we’ll find something soon… I know you can’t rush it but I have high hopes for the short menswear store.  Fingers-crossed!