The dress!

Haha! In a stroke of ridiculous good luck, I've managed to prove the point that an ethical wedding needn't be an expensive one. Indeed, it's just gotten very, very affordable in at least one respect. Totally by chance, I've found my dress, and it cost a tenner in a second-hand shop on Oldham St in Manchester...
I was never really a candidate for traditional white. Firstly, I'm surprised enough to find myself getting married in the first place, and envisaging myself in the full white works is just further than my imagination can stretch. Secondly, I really don't look that good in white. Thirdly, it would be mildly fraudulent...
I'm not inherently opposed to white wedding dresses. My mate Liz (interviewed below), had a gorgeous one that fit her kind of classic, 50s style fantastically. But at five foot nothing and a half, I need to be careful with styles that might make me look even shorter than I am (especially when Overgrown Antipodean is six foot four and we already look like we're from different species and will have the daftest wedding photos anyway). So any of your frothy white numbers would be out, since they do tend to make people my height look like a snowdrift. And so many meringues are just reallt quite horrible - especially, however, the 80s-style peach satin one I walked past in, I think, Bride Be Lovely a few weeks back.
There are, of course, some great ethical wedding dress makers nowadays, especially Conscious Elegance, www.consciouselegance.com, which does a range of classic wedding gowns, made to measure from environmentally sound fabrics. Or there are places like Oxfam, which sells wedding dresses for charity - a bit hit or miss, as they're dependent on donations, but there was an absolutely gorgeous antique one on their website recently for a ridiculously reasonable price (go to the website, click on 'shop' and then search the 'women's' section). Or ethical designer companies like Enamore or Ciel do lovely frocks for a less traditional look.
So, without risking Bad Luck (this whole wedding thing has made me bizarrely superstitious), we have a lovely little fitted dress, simple cut, in a kind of patterned satiny finish and a warm goldish shade that is very forgiving on my fair-to-washed-out sort of complexion. It's the kind of thing that will look classy for the day but I can still dance in it in the evening, and it will make a great party frock thereafter.
And all for a tenner...