A woman came face to face with a wardrobe dilemma just hours before attending her cousin’s nuptials and in a urgent need for advice, she looked to the internet for help.
Twenty-three-year-old Alessia from New Jersey posted a TikTok video of a romantic sequin dress that was butter yellow in color but had the appearance of a white bridal gown. She wondered if it was acceptable to wear to the ceremony without breaking that rule. “I don’t wanna be that person. Is it too white-adjacent?” she wrote.
Let’s just say, the internet wasn’t too happy.
Courtesy Alessia
Alessia’s original wedding guest dress that caused heated reactions on TikTok
Reactions under the video, which garnered nearly one million views, were as unfiltered as they come.
“Are you the bride? Bc [sic] this is a wedding dress. If you are a guest, put it back in the closet and pick something with color,” wrote one user.
“If you do’t want to dye it, just buy a cheap dress elsewhere. I’d take a night of wearing a mid dress over the possible drama and fall out of wearing the wrong thing to a wedding,” commented another.
The most common reaction? People thinking Alessia was the one walking down the aisle because her dress looked so “bridal-adjacent.” The comments reached the point of the app intituting an “anti-bullying filter” on her video.
However, following all the shocking reactions to her post, Alessia tells PEOPLE that there’s way more to the story.
A few weeks before the wedding, Alessia placed an order for guest-appropriate dresses. While she had her fingers crossed that they would come in time, they didn’t, and her next best option was to look for alternatives, one of them including the infamous butter yellow dress, which she had doubts about before she even went on social media for help.
“My mom, my grandma and my two sister-in-laws were like, ‘The dress is completely fine, wear it.’ I just had this pit in my stomach. I wanted to text my cousin who’s the bride, but I also didn’t want to inconvenience her,” she tells PEOPLE.
And when her friends didn’t pick up her call (it was early in the morning before Alessia had to prep for the wedding), that’s when she took to TikTok.
Alessia never expected — or intended to — stir things up, but when she realized she could get back at the haters in a cheeky way, she did.
“My friend said she recently went viral for doing a little rage bait, and I was like, you know what? If these comments are going to be as egregious as they are, I might as well just get the likes for something,” she says.
So then came the follow-up post with Alessia playing oblivious to all the hate she and the dress were receiving.
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In the end, Alessia trusted her gut and decided on another look, a $48 yellow cowl neck dress from Zara, similar in style to Kate Hudson’s iconic slip from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days that her mom had picked up for her (along with the butter yellow one that stayed at home).
“Everything ended up being fine,” says Alessia. “Nobody commented on whatever dress I ended up wearing, and everybody just was having the time of their lives. Everybody at the wedding was so unbothered by everything, and if they did see the video before I even went there, they were like, ‘That’s so funny that people care so much.'”
The bride’s reaction to the whole thing?
“She had no issue with it,” confirms Alessia. “There was a bunch of people at the wedding that were wearing very light colors. It was a summer wedding and she encouraged lighter colors. There was no way that I could even try to upstage the bride, she was beautiful.”
Courtesy Alessia
Alessia in the dress she ultimately wore to her cousin’s wedding
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And when Alessia explained the full story in another TikTok video, the bride herself even wrote: “My love! I’m the bride! That dress would’ve absolutely been fine! But the dress my gorg cousin chose was just as gorgeous!”
Despite all the controversy and rude commentary the original dress caused online, Alessia has no plans to return it. “I’m like, ‘Okay, objectively I do not look bad in this dress. You could say anything else, but this dress looks fly on me,'” says Alessia, who plans on packing the dazzling number for an upcoming vacation to Italy.
Read the original article on People
