It seems that being a wedding gown designer was bred into Claire Pettibone as a young girl when she attended a wedding at the age of 4 and decided she wanted to make wedding gowns.  Growing up in New York City, she ended up going to and graduating from the Otis Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles with a degree in fashion design.

Her first big success was in the Beverly Hills area, where, with her husband, she launched her first designs to rave reviews.  Years later she established her credibility throughout the entire country with another show in New York City.  Her designs are so exclusive that, even though they’re all over the world, only 29 stores have licenses to market them new, including her own salon in Beverly Hills, Claire Pettibone Flagship.

Pettibone’s wedding dress style is reminiscent of styles from the 1940′s and 1950′s.  Many of her creations could stand alone as evening gowns, but that doesn’t mean their simplistic.  They have a very comfortable looking style, soft and flowing, with lace and embroidery touches.  She makes them with all styles of sleeves and necklines, and tends to stay away from tight bodices.  These dresses move with the brides, so no stiff satin wedding gowns for her.  You might have layered dresses, dresses with flowers, even ruffles, and there’s nothing saying her wedding dresses will all be white, or at least pure white.

As a matter of face, her 2010 Cherry Blossom collection of wedding gowns had a mixture of muted whites and shimmering dresses that almost looked like silver, with beautiful touches of lace netting and embroidery.  One of the dresses even had a thin red belt, while another flaunted a big pink flower in the middle of the bodice area, which included a pink belt and a pink tassle; talk about taking chances!  Yet, it all fit, and that’s what makes Pettibone a favorite wedding dress designer.

See more:
Claire Pettibone Official Website
Claire Pettibone Botique
Claire Pettibone Facebook Page

Do you know how much the most expensive wedding dress in history cost? How about $12 million dollars? What made it that expensive? The addition of 150 carats of diamonds, for a dress presented by the Renee Strauss bridal salon of Beverly Hills, which caters to celebrities and the rich.

Another very expensive dress, made in 2006, featured over 1,000 pearls, one of the world’s only two 5 carat white gold diamonds, and came in at a stout $8.5 million dollars. With both of these dresses, the rest of the materials were standard for wedding dresses, and it was the accessorizing that made them what they were.

However, for something truly different, there was another wedding dress that comes in just over $1.4 million, and it’s made out of peacock feathers. You read that right, peacock feathers, the tail feathers to be more specific, along with 60 Hetian Chinese jade stones and an almost 10-foot train.

The truth is that you can pretty much have a wedding dress made out of anything these days. There are some pretty creative designers in this world that love a challenge, and would love dressing women in all sorts of fabrics and designs. And not all of them are super expensive, although a strapless wedding dress recently exhibited by Tutera, the host of My Fair Wedding, came in at just over $500,000. It was made with platinum colored silk tulle, which is a lightweight, very fine netting fabric, 10 feet of platinum chain, 33 carats of diamonds, 145 carats of aquamarine, white keshi pearls, and a white south sea pearl pendant.

A woman in China recently got married in a paper wedding dress designed by a friend of hers. It took 2 1/2 months to create, made out of cotton paper and highlighted with silver lining. It had a 5-foot train, and lots of paper fabric building up the silhouette. As lavish as that sounds, there’s a yearly competition in the United States where designers create dresses out of toilet paper in a competition, with the criteria being that the dress has to actually be able to be worn in a wedding. And these dresses need to be made inexpensively because first prize is only $1,000.

If you as the bride have a fabric that you like better than silk or satin, why not take them to a local designer to see if they can create something for your wedding day? There have even been wedding dresses made out of burlap; I’ve never heard how comfortable they are, though.

See more:
Christos Wedding Dresses
Reem Acra Wedding Dresses
Monique Lhuillier Wedding Dresses