Alfred Angelo

Alfred Angelo does have very nice dresses to choose from and are reasonably priced for the quality you receive (much better than David’s Bridal). The one Alfred Angelo storefront I walked into I have no complaints with. The salesperson was very nice & patient. However since there are no storefronts in the bay area, I ordered through a bridal shop.
That is where the pleasantness stopped. For such a large nationwide chain, this was the worst customer service I received out of my whole wedding experience and ranks near the top for worst customer service in general. My entire correspondence with them was very peremptory and abrupt. To this day, I’m not sure who I was talking to the entire time because they never signed their emails. They hardly addressed their emails as well, which seemed unprofessional.
So I don’t know what to attribute to the bridal shop and to the corporate office for this portion, but I had exchanged the dress I had received (size 4) for a size 2. The size 2 came, but was huge, and the quality of worksmanship was not the same as the first dress. I told the shop it was huge and they pushed alterations. I said I’d tried this dress on in the Alfred Angelo storefront and it had fit me perfectly. They contacted the corporate office and the dress was sent back for them to measure. My mom was the one corresponding with them at this time and they responded that the dress was correctly sized for a size 2 with a 24″ waist. We had measured the dress before we sent it off and it was 29.5″. We kept asking for clarification, saying we know the size chart says 24″, but what is the dress really supposed to measure? They kept saying it was 24″, that the bridal shop had measured me wrong, perhaps my waist is a couple inches smaller than 24″, and said they were going to send the dress back to me because they weren’t going to do anymore. To this point, all correspondence had been through my mom by phone so I sent an email to reiterate what had been said so far.
I said I understood that the dress was supposed to be sized for a 24″ waist person and understood that it should not be expected to measure exactly 24″ because a person still had to move around, but I repeated again that we did not get the same measurement when we measured the dress, asked how they took their measurements to say it was 24, and said again I had tried the same size dress on in the store and it had fit me. The corporate office had the dress measured again by a different seamstress and responded that the waist measured 3″ too big. I asked what happened before with the measuring. The rep replied that the seamstress had measured the length (pretty weak excuse if you ask me. weeks were wasted over this). I asked since they were going to fix the dress if it was going to alter the embroidery and beading as there was a great deal of both on the bodice. The rep said no. Time passed and I inquired again. The seamstress had been on vacation. Later, I was contacted again and told that yes, it would affect the design on the dress. My choice at this point since there was not much time left before the wedding was to choose to take off 3″ of design (design was not a repeating random design, so it would have been noticeable) or pick the properly sized bodice but non petite length. There was also beading on the bottom of the dress and I had specifically paid an extra $ 100 for the petite size so the beading at the bottom of the dress would be in the right place. I chose the properly sized dress with altered bottom and had asked for assurance that nothing else would be wrong when they sent it to me in the mail (this was just weeks before the wedding) as there would be no time for anymore sending the dress back and forth or for getting it altered. Of course I had received no reply on that (they never answered all my questions & only responded when they wanted something from me). However, in a previous email, the rep had assured that the seamstress had years of experience and did all the alterations on their dresses.
The dress came and on first try-​on, it appeared to be okay. My mom came up the week before the wedding to work on the bustle. After looking at it for a while she came out and said I don’t know if you want to hear this, but the dress is uneven. After all that, the dress was hemmed unevenly! The front panel was hemmed to the proper length, but the hem was tapered off unevenly (i.e. one side hemmed up to second panel, one side hemmed off to third panel). Of course, once it was pointed out to me, yes, one side of the dress was longer when I had it on, and was dragging on the floor even with shoes on. Upon closer inpection, the dress wasn’t even hemmed well because it was pressed at the wrong point, making the top edge bubble out. Experienced seamstress my a#$! Needless to say, my mom had to do some last minute hemming as the bustle would not have been even otherwise, and it worked out in the end