My taste in wedding gowns tends toward the theatrical, and that goes a long way towards explaining why I just spent half an hour drooling over the couture gowns at Uptight Clothing. WOW. The photos in the Real Brides section make me want get married five more times, dressed in varying degrees of queenly regalia like this or this or this.

The prices are very high (especially with the pound-to-dollar exchange rate), but if your tastes run towards the fairy/goth/costumey, Uptight Clothing is a site well-worth perusing for inspiration. And hey: if you've got $6k to spend on a dress (reality check: that was the cost of my entire wedding!) then for godsake: get something like this!

For those uninterested in princess wedding dresses, prepare to have your head explode from the innovative gorgeousness that is indie-designer Chrissy Wai-Ching Leung's dress line. Hailing from Seattle via Chicago, Hong Kong, and Nice, France, Chrissy specializes in making custom silk wedding dresses that fly (or in some cases float) in the face of over-brocaded poofy white wedding wear. Using hand-dyed silks, each dress is custom made to meet the needs of the bride's tastes and curves, ensuring that your wedding dress is truly one of a kind.

Chrissy caters to brides all over the nation via her website, but if you happen to be looking for a Seattle wedding dress, you owe it to yourself to visit her cozy Pioneer Square loft studio where, if you're like me, you'll want to fondle the samples and pet the silk-ribboned pillows for a couple hours. Forget the "white blindness" so common at bridal boutiques — at Wai-Ching you bathe in rich blues and reds and greens.

An offbeat bride in DC, has started an offbeat bride co-op aiming a cluster of like-minded women who can compare notes, support each other, and pool their resources, ala Susan Beal's fabulous wedding co-op concept in my book. If you're in DC and are interested in joining, check out the LJ community. And if you're in a different city and want to organize something similar, let me know!