Your wedding day is unquestionably a very special day in anybody's life, but it can also be one of the most expensive. For any bride perhaps the most important item on the shopping list will be her bridal dress and with a growing number of good quality but relatively cheap wedding dresses on the market nowadays it is possible to have your dream dress without spending an arm and a leg.

For a lot of people a wedding dress needs to be a full length white gown, symbolizing the bride�s pure heart and innocence, complete with veil and train originally made popular by Queen Victoria who broke away from the royal custom of marrying in silver and chose a white dress for her wedding to Prince Albert. This started a craze which has continued until today with many brides choosing white or a variation of white such as cream, eggshell or ivory.

Today however we are seeing two major changes when it comes to weddings.

The first is a return to pre-Victorian days when ladies married in simpler dresses of almost any color that took their fancy, apart from black which was traditionally worn for mourning and red which was associated with 'ladies of the night'. This also means generally abandoning the veil, which is believed to be a symbol of virginity, and the train which is very much a trapping of royal weddings and emulates the peacock, which was formerly seen as a royal bird.

The second is a move away from the church wedding towards weddings held in a wide variety of venues, including the now popular beach wedding.

As a result not only do brides today have a far wider choice of color for their bridal dress but, more importantly, dispensing with the veil and train and the requirement to have a full length dress means that brides can pick from a range of far simpler bridal gowns. For those of us who need to key a close eye on costs this is wonderful news because informal bridal gowns are also a lot cheaper than the full length traditional white wedding outfit.

One other important point here is that the move away from the traditional white wedding gown also means that you no longer have to purchase your dress from a specialist bridal outfitter who, naturally, will charge a premium merely for the service that is provided or for the name or brand that you are buying. It is a bit like a pair of training shoes � you can purchase two more or less identical pairs of shoes and pay six times more for one pair than for the other simply because of its brand name.

There has without doubt never been a better time to shop for your bridal dress and the choice available to you nowadays in terms of style, color and supplier is enormous. It is now quite easy to find reasonably inexpensive wedding gowns and still look like a million dollars in the dress of your dreams.

For more information about everything from cheap wedding dresses to unusual wedding cake toppers please visit TalkingWeddings.com today.