Your size on the rack is not your size in a shop

European bridal patterns are cut close. A woman who buys a size 6 dress on a high street usually tries a bridal 8 or 10. Nothing is wrong with the body and nothing is wrong with the dress; the two size systems were simply never the same.

That is why every dress on this site shows its real size run, and why the filled cells are the only ones that exist today. A filled 8 means one physical dress, size 8, hanging in Ottawa this week.

A dress can be taken in by roughly two sizes without losing its shape. Letting out is harder: it depends on the seam allowance the manufacturer left, and on lace, which will not stretch where a pattern is cut.

The practical rule when buying from the rack: choose by the widest part of your body, usually the ribcage or the hips, and let the alteration do the rest. A bodice that closes but pulls across the back is a dress that has already been outgrown.

If nothing on the rack is close, the same model is ordered from the supplier in your size in six to ten weeks, and that is still faster than the six to ten months a special order takes at most Canadian salons.