Originally Posted by Nyororin (Post 530762)

In my experience, either you look great in a yukata or you look silly. There doesn`t seem to be too much of a mid ground. I think I look like an idiot in one, but my sister looked wonderful.
I had a friend tell me I looked beautiful in a kimono, and she was serious... So perhaps it is all in the eye of the beholder.
Either way, I`m not comfortable enough in yukata or kimono to go about wearing one. Wearing a kimono at my wedding and yukata for about a week in the hospital (yes, hospital gowns here are yukata) after my son was born was enough for a lifetime.

Originally Posted by Paul11 (Post 530768)

My wedding was a shinto ceremony, so I had the full get-up. It looked good and felt great, there were so many obi that there was tons of back support. But not in public. It's not just how you look, but whether or not your the nail that sticks out.

Originally Posted by Nyororin (Post 530770)

I think that in the case of women, it has a lot to do with the bust. The traditional form is a very straight one, so if you have a larger bust either you`re going to look weird because it shows a lot up there (as my yukata experiences have been), or you`re going to have to put 50 towels around your waist and shoulders to destroy any sign of curves (like they did for our shinto ceremony).

Either way, sadly, never looks quite right. The flatter the chest the easier it is to pull off... Men, on the other hand, can usually manage to look at the least quite decent as long as they pull off the posture and walk correctly.

Random off topic question - Paul11, where did you have your ceremony? I`m assuming a fairly private locale... I`m jealous. Ours was in front of throngs of tourists in full sakura season at Atsuta Jingu. In-laws wouldn`t settle for anything less for the family heir. *sigh*

Originally Posted by Paul11 (Post 530773)

Some women role towels, put them along their sides by their hips and tie them in place with an under-kimono. thier shapes are changing with diet and they are still trying to get that "kokeshi" shape.

Originally Posted by Nyororin (Post 530777)

Unfortunately, when they`re dressing you for a wedding, you don`t really get a choice. They put towels upon towels upon towels, until I could have supplied a sento with the number they kept wrapping somewhere to try and achieve balance of some sort. I would have much preferred they just wrap my breasts to make them flatter - the obi would have taken care of my waist to hip ratio. And I should have said something at the time, it may have saved me from looking like a balloon and being unable to lower my arms completely... but of course hindsight is 20/20.



It looks like a beautiful place off the beaten track. We wanted to have ours at Narumi Jinja, (too small to even have an official page, it seems, but dear to our hearts) but after a visit with the in-laws in tow, they deemed it too small and not prestigious enough. ("No one has heard of it!") We refused to go with a package wedding hall plan, so only a few selections were left that would fit their requirements. But hey, they paid for it, so we couldn`t really complain.

ETA: We didn`t get to eat a single bite of our cake, and the last half of the banquet as we made the silly choice to pass out the cake ourselves to all thousand guests. (An exaggeration, of course, but there had to be at least 100) We wanted to make things personal and give greetings to everyone...

Originally Posted by Paul11 (Post 530780)

Sounds about right. when both our parents did not give thier blessings we planned everything ourselves. Finally, mother-in-law invited me into the family. Which means she got involved and replanned everything 6 weeks prior to the wedding.