Can the groom see the dress? How to match his suit without showing him

Plenty of couples keep the dress a secret until the day, for luck, for the moment itself or for family custom. In many Jewish families the couple don’t see each other for the days before the wedding at all, and the groom first sees his bride at the bedeken, when he lowers her veil. Whatever the reason, it leaves one practical question: how does the groom choose a suit to stand beside a dress he hasn’t seen?

He doesn’t need to see it. His suit needs four facts about the gown, not the gown itself.

The four facts his suit needs

1. How formal it is. The shape, the fabric and the hour together. A satin ball gown in the evening wants a dinner suit beside it; a tulle tea-length outdoors by day wants something much lighter. This decides the cloth and the cut.
2. What white it is. Bright white, ivory, champagne. His shirt should agree with it: a bright white shirt beside an ivory gown makes the gown look yellow in photographs, so an ivory gown takes an ivory shirt.
3. Whether it has a colour. Blush, gold, red. If it does, his tie can echo it, once.
4. What the invitation says. If it says black tie, he wears a dinner suit whatever the gown.

None of the four gives the dress away. “Ivory, formal, evening, no colour” could be a thousand gowns.

How to pass them on without a photograph

On the Gown Match, you describe the gown in a few taps: its shape, its sleeves, its colour, its fabric, and when and where the wedding is. The page draws the gown on a dressmaker’s form beside the suit that goes with it, and says why. Then it gives you two links.

• The pair, with the gown, for you: your mother, your sister, your bridesmaids.
• His suit alone, for him. The link shows the suit drawn on its own, with a sentence saying what it is, and nothing about the gown.

He can open it, change the cloth or the tie on the Drawing Board, and bring it to the studio. The ivory shirt and the gold tie will look like his own good taste.

What he can decide without the dress

Most of the suit is his: the cloth within the shade the gown asks for, the lapels, whether he wants a waistcoat, the lining, the fit. What the gown decides is narrower than it sounds: the level of dress, the white of his shirt and perhaps the colour of his tie. What the groom wears with her gown draws five gowns with their suits.

Sending it to Sam

You can send the pair to Sam from the Gown Match, so he knows what the suit stands beside before the groom comes in; tell him it’s a surprise. The suit is measured and made at the studio in Vaughan, with one fitting on the finished garment. Two to three months before the wedding is comfortable, and the groomsmen can be drawn to match from the same suit.

We don’t make or sell wedding gowns, and nobody pays us to mention one. The Gown Match only ever knows a gown as a shape, a colour and a fabric.