Racing Down the Aisle for Bargain Wedding Gowns

Da-Dum-de-Dum: At Filene's, A Bridal March in Double Time

Nancy Tita of Hyattsville, center, guards her dresses after another woman grabbed one from her pile at the annual discount sale of designer gowns at Filene's Basement on Wisconsin. Tita says she will marry sometime next year. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

Tamasha Barnes, an architect from Manassas, pulls from her purse a magazine photograph she clipped four years ago showing a model in a slim, simple, off-white wedding gown. It is the dress she pined for long before she even met the right man and long before he proposed to her. Now it is the dress she dreams of wearing to the altar before they have even set a date.

The dress is everything.

Barnes, 29, is among the hundreds of women who gathered yesterday outside Filene's Basement on Wisconsin Avenue NW for its annual "Running of the Brides," a one-day-only sale of 1,400 designer wedding dresses. They've been marked down to as low as $249 from as high as $10,000. A tradition of the original Filene's Basement in Boston since 1947, the sale has evolved into a cultural event that now travels to places such as Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and, for the past five years, Washington, which last year set the national record for the shortest lag between the opening of the doors and the racks being stripped bare --37 seconds.

The sale reveals the double identity of today's fiancee -- who is at once a ruthless Bridezilla brawling for a Vera Wang and then, preening before a mirrored column to the oohs and aahs of future bridesmaids, an innocent in white, the fulfillment of a romantic ideal. Here women steal, rip, strip, squeeze, cry. To guard against fights, Filene's Basement hires extra security just for the day.

The doors open at 8 a.m. Women started lining up in front of Mazza Gallerie on Thursday afternoon.

"Most of my brides would not even consider going there," says Linda Garner, a Bethesda wedding planner who works 150 weddings yearly. "[But] with a sale like that you really don't have an opportunity to stop and think about what you're doing."

On the sidewalk, teams arrive in matching T-shirts, toting full-length mirrors, wearing whistles. In dawn's apricot light, women coach their shopping helpers in terms like beaded, sateen, gauzy, off-the-shoulder. As in any sport, there must be preparation: The women devise breakaway patterns, envision meeting points, divide tasks.

The idea is to get inside and immediately start hauling plastic-sheathed dresses from racks and dividing them into piles like fishermen tossing their catch on a dock.

For every 25 or so women, one man stands apart, arms crossed, wondering how he got here. Angelique Manning, a Fort Washington bride-to-be, brought two -- her father, Bernard, and her fiance, Ben Okeke, who breaks a handful of traditional rules just by being here. "I would've never thought it would be this crazy," Okeke says, looking ahead at the line. "It's like we're lining up for free Super Bowl tickets."

"Let us in! Let us in!" chants a team in pink shirts that read "Bride of Mayhem" and "Maid of Mayhem." Father of Mayhem utters, "Oy vey," before whoosh , the doors open and he sprints toward the racks.

One mother falls, losing a shoe.

Teams elbow for gowns, ignoring style and size, throwing as many as they can onto heaps. By 8:01 a.m., the racks are bare.