Bridesmaid Dress Love #1: J. Crew

I already mentioned the first thing that we purchased for the wedding, but I'll tell you the first thing that I did.  I actually ordered fabric swatches for bridesmaid dresses from J. Crew (and did I mention that I had not asked a single bridesmaid yet?)!  J. Crew is my favorite store and I so wanted the bridesmaids to wear dresses from there!  One of the reasons that I wanted J. Crew dresses was because their clothes are well-made.  Most bridesmaid dresses are made from polyester, but most of the J. Crew (bridesmaid) dresses are made from silk.  I was interested in different dresses for the girls in the same color and fabric to create a unified look while letting each girl express her personal style.  J. Crew dresses are pretty expensive, like everything else in the store, so I started doing some research into how to save money on J. Crew.  Here are some suggestions:

• eBay:  As I mentioned before, I do own a few J. Crew pieces, but half of them I purchased off of eBay.  You can find some pretty great deals on eBay, but you do have to be careful and try them on first in the store because it may not be what you expect and you usually can't return anything you bought on eBay.
• Student/Teacher discounts: J. Crew doesn't advertise this, but you can get a 15% discount in the store if you're a student or teacher.  The caveat is that you must purchase in the store (I don't know how this works for wedding stuff since that isn't usually sold in the store except at the flagships), and it must be a full-price item.
• Sales:  I am a "fan" of J. Crew on Facebook, so I get alerted to their sales.  Once in a blue moon they do have 30 or 40% off sales that can be applicable to sale items.  I got a $30 cardigan from the J. Crew website that way.  We are waiting for one of these sales to purchase a suit for Eddie.

After about a month, it became clear that J. Crew was not going to send me the fabric swatches that I had requested.  I was somewhat prepared for this since I had read in various online forums that they are very bad about things like that, so I decided to just take a shortcut route and purchase four bridesmaid dresses for my MOH to try on (which I would then return in the store).  I picked my favorite dresses from the bunch: Juliet, Sophia, Cecelia (looooooove this dress!), and Erica. I wanted to see some different colors that might work with my color scheme, so I purchased dresses in pewter, graphite, tropical aqua and fresh mint.

These are the dresses available in light pewter, from one of Miss Scissors' (Weddingbee) posts.  Miss Scissors is so good at Photoshop/Illustrator!

Here's where I ran into some problems.  Tropical aqua and fresh mint look like they might work in pictures, but they were very, very green!  I wanted blue!  So that brought it down to grey dresses.  My MOH thought that the light pewter would be too similar to my wedding gown since it was so light--I didn't necessarily see that as a problem, since I read somewhere the bridesmaids were originally dressed identically to the bride in order to confuse evil spirits who might want to consume the bride's soul. ;)  But I did realize that the light pewter might not be very complementary on everyone's skin tone.  So that led me to the graphite color.  I own a skirt in this color, which I love (but I also own a cardigan in the light pewter color--I wore both on our engagement).  Here are some lovely images of J. Crew bridesmaids in graphite that inspired me:

Image by Michele Waite, featured on Style Me Pretty

Image by Karen Wise, featured on Style Me Pretty

After discussing with my cousin a little bit, though, she thought that I should just try to find the blue (which is a teal or aqua color) that I wanted instead of compromising on grey.  I do love grey dresses, but blue would "pop" more and probably be more complementary on all of the bridesmaids.  SO the search continued...

Are you doing off-the-rack or traditional bridesmaid dresses? Or something else entirely?