Original Title: Topless at a Reception: A Nursing Story
My cousin got married when my youngest was five weeks old. I wore a dress that zipped up the back, because it had not thought beyond the photos. At 4:40 I was in the accessible bathroom with my dress zipped off trying to feed my baby while the lights were on a motion sensor, and every ninety seconds I had to wave one elbow at the ceiling to turn them back on.
She was fine. I was fine. I just spent forty minutes solving a problem I could have solved in a fitting room in April.
If you are nursing, or pumping, or six weeks out and still figuring out what you are doing, there is a second set of questions the size chart never asks you.
Three questions, before you get to the color
Where does it open? Front, top, side, or back. Back is the one that costs you. A back zipper is a two person job or a mirror job, and at a wedding it is a bathroom job.
Can you do it one handed, sitting down? You will be holding a baby with the other arm. Put the dress on, sit down in a chair, and try it with one hand. That is the real test and it takes about ten seconds.
Does it go back? Some dresses open beautifully and then look slept in for the rest of the night. Smocking goes back. Ties go back. Anything you had to unzip and rearrange usually does not, quite.
What actually works
The one that unties. The Everbloom Dress in teal has a milkmaid bodice with an adjustable front tie, a square neckline, and boning in the waistline. The tie is the part that matters. You loosen it, you use it, you pull it back and tie it again, and nothing about the dress reads differently afterward. There is a back zipper, so getting into it is still a two person job. The part you will do four times that day is at the front. It runs 00 to 34, and the description recommends sizing up.
The one that stretches. The Cerise Dress is fuchsia floral cotton with a smocked stretchable bodice, a V neckline, and puff sleeves that sit off the shoulder. Smocking is the friendliest word on a product page for this. It pulls, it gives, it comes back where it was. Sizes XXS to 6X, and every size is in stock as I write this, which is not always true of the pretty ones.
The one with nothing on your shoulders. The Betty Dress is a strapless smocked cotton midi in white. No strap to move, no sleeve to work around, and it is machine washable, which is not a small detail in the first year. It is a late summer dress and I am linking it in the last week of August on purpose. Cotton, XXS to 6X, all thirteen sizes in stock.
The part I would rather tell you now
The Nursing Friendly collection has 212 dresses in it. That tag means a dress can be nursed in. It does not promise you it will be quick, or graceful, or something you will want to attempt in a room full of people you only see at weddings. Read it as a place to start. Then go do the one handed chair test.
And the strapless one comes with a caveat I am not going to skip. Strapless works by gripping your rib cage, and your rib cage six weeks after a baby is not the rib cage you had in April. If you are ordering for a date that is still a month or two out, that is the measurement I would take twice, and it is the one reason I would tell you to size for the day rather than the fitting.
My youngest is three. I am far enough out that I had to scroll back through my own photos to write this, and close enough that I found the one I was looking for in about four seconds. It is from that reception. I am at a round table with a burp cloth over my shoulder and a slice of cake somebody else walked over and set down in front of me, and I am laughing at something off the left edge of the frame that I do not remember at all.