How to Choose a Bridesmaid Bouquet

Dear Members,

Your team of bridesmaids is made up of your best friends and loved ones, each of whom in some way symbolizes an aspect of your passage through life.

These ladies are a reflection of you — where you’ve been and the choices you’ve made while getting there. So when it comes to choosing the bridesmaid bouquets, keep this spirit in mind — their bouquets should reflect your own, either in color or in shape, and come together to create a unified look.

Flower

Fashion & Flowers

Perhaps the first thing that a bride starts thinking about, after her own dress, is what her maids are going to wear. And because the bouquets are going to be the bridesmaids’ biggest, most eye-catching accessory, it’s important that both the dress and the flowers work well together — in both style and color.

Keep the size of the bouquets in check with the style of the dress. Slinky sheaths work best with smaller, sleeker bouquets (perhaps with long, elegant stems), while fuller dresses look great with rounder styles.

With tea-length dresses sweeping the wedding front, matching the sophisticated airiness is important — a heavy, cascading bouquet would look out of place with a dress that’s so light.

But perhaps more important than the style is the color of the dress. Past trends have led brides to match bouquets identically to what the bridesmaids are wearing — a periwinkle dress to a periwinkle sweet pea.

The problem with such a look is that the flowers tend to drown in the dress itself, so that the detail in both the dress and in the flowers is lost.

If you’re set on keeping the color coherent, your best bet is to choose a gradation of the dress color for contrast — picking a lavender bouquet to match a rich amethyst dress, for example.

Today, more and more brides are leaning toward flowers of complementing or even contrasting shades. Although most of us haven’t taken a design class, there is some method to the madness when trying to find colors that work together (it’s not exactly an “I like orange and purple, so I’m going to do orange and purple” kind of formula).

Whether you pick monochromatic colors (variations of the same hue), adjacent colors (next to each other on the color wheel — like yellow, yellow-green, and green), or opposite colors (a warm color paired with a cool color, like yellow and violet), do your research before you make a final decision on a palette.