Christian Pope Campbell, of East Greenwich, who has been in 13 weddings, shows some of the bridesmaid dresses she has acquired. “I’ve got some ugly dresses,” she says laughing. Campbell admits that, looking back, the dresses she chose for her own wedding weren’t exactly attractive.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

In the new romantic comedy 27 Dresses, actress Katherine Heigl’s character insists she loves being a bridesmaid for her friends, even though she’s done it 27 times. But truth be told, the bridesmaid experience can be a nightmare.

Just ask Caroline Sauve of Warwick, who was asked to be a bridesmaid about 20 years ago, back in Canada, where she’s from. She didn’t know the bride very well. She was a friend of the groom at the time. She didn’t really know what the job entailed, so “I asked around . . . and was told that all I had to do was to show up and look pretty,” Sauve recalled. “Sounded simple enough, so I agreed.”

But it turned out to be “the worst experience ever,” Sauve said. The bride ordered them to attend regularly scheduled meetings for the next nine months, to not only help plan the wedding but to make centerpieces and decorations.

The bride had chosen an Easter theme for the wedding and asked Sauve’s mom to sew 38 ducks for centerpieces — which ended up not being used, because the bride decided they didn’t look quite right.

She even told Sauve that she’d have to let her shoulder-length hair grow, saying, “there’s no way I want you to have short hair for my wedding.”

“So, of course I wound up cutting it,” Sauve said. “By then, I was feeling kind of rebellious.”

And then there were the gowns.

The bride initially picked out Christian Dior-style dresses that cost more than $300 apiece, “which was a lot of money for us 20 years ago,” Sauve said. So the woman instead hired a seamstress to make the gowns of a stiff synthetic fabric in various pastel shades, and they looked “like a basket of Easter eggs” marching down the aisle. She described her dress as “bubblegum pink,” with matching hat and shoes.

Worst of all, the fabric “squeaked” as they walked.

“I still remember the 300 quiet guests when we walked in church. All you could hear was ‘squeak, squeak, squeak,’ ” she recalled.

On the plus side, she said, the dress still fits — even 20 years later — though she has never worn it again. “I am still waiting for the just the right Halloween party,” she quipped.

DRESSES ARE THE BIGGEST COMPLAINT most bridesmaids have. When we asked Lifebeat readers like Sauve to share their bridesmaid stories, readers told us about similar experiences — and fashion faux pas.

Jane Fusco, director of news and public relations at Rhode Island College in Providence, recalls that she “looked like a roll of Reynolds Wrap” walking down the aisle of a sorority sister’s wedding, with the attendants all in metallic silver halter dresses back in the 1970s.

Edna Holdsworth of Johnston, who was invited to be a bridesmaid for her brother’s wedding more than 50 years ago, recalled that her sister-in-law wanted a wedding to rival a scene from Gone With the Wind.

So she chose a floor-length strapless gown — which, in itself, was taboo at the church and required a stole. The gowns had huge hoop skirts and petticoats, which no one was used to maneuvering around in. And, of course, it poured the day of the wedding. So everyone was soaking wet and freezing cold. Because of the hoops and petticoats, they couldn’t easily get in and out of their cars. “It was a disaster,” she said.

Another woman, who asked that her name not be used so as not to offend the many friends who’ve invited her to partake in their special days, recalled that her “least flattering dress” was black velvet from the waist up, with a sweetheart neckline and “puffy short sleeves that rivaled any linebacker’s shoulder pads.” With black velvet chokers and cameos, she said, “the overall look … was that of a bloated Mallard duck.”

“All the maids could have perched on top of grandma’s toilet paper rolls — remember the crocheted dolls that were supposed to camouflage the extra roll? I believe they were the models for our gowns. Standing together, we could have caused an eclipse.”

This woman is among those convinced that brides deliberately torture their attendants “lest we forget that they are the stars of the day.” In fact, she said, “It’s quite an honor to shell out hundreds of dollars to look like a buffoon on your friend’s special day.”

CHRIS REBELLO OF NORTH PROVIDENCE believes she has “the worst bridesmaid’s story ever.” It started with being fitted for her “junior prom-size dress” while she was nine months pregnant, for a wedding that was to take place just after she gave birth to her son.

She ended up having to pay $400 for tailoring — in addition to the $100 or so she’d spent for the dress — and even then it looked awful. “No one,” she said, “would ever believe how ugly this thing was.”

It was a lacy black strapless, knee-length dress with a “dog collar” around the neck and a piece of white lace down the front. “It was designed to be a prom dress, but in junior sizes” — which looked inappropriate on the attendants, especially someone like Rebello who was 30 at the time.

The black shoes they had to buy weren’t black enough, so they had to be dyed to make them darker. Each bridesmaid carried a black fan covered with flowers, and they all were instructed to wear their hair up on one side, no matter whether that style was flattering to any of them.

“Hideous is the only word that can be used to describe all of this,” she said.

The wedding was on April 15, a week after a big snowstorm, and the bride insisted on taking pictures of the wedding party in a soggy cemetery in Woonsocket.

Why? “I don’t know. The girl was just a nut.”

The bride wore a white Madonna-style gown and didn’t seem to care how anyone else looked, “because it was her day.” There was no point in appealing to the groom, because he was totally smitten at the time, Rebello said.

The couple is now divorced, Rebello said, “and I haven’t seen her since.”

IN 27 DRESSES, A RUNNING JOKE is that the bride always says to her bridesmaids, “And the best part is, you can shorten it and wear it again!” But most readers said they’ve never worn their bridesmaid dresses again — not even the most elegant of gowns, like the ones chosen by Kim Anderson’s sister-in-law 15 years ago.

“It was a very formal wedding,” Anderson, who lives in Barrington, recalled. She was the matron of honor, and there was a maid of honor, 15 bridesmaids and 5 flower girls.

The bride’s gown “was incredible,” she recalled, and each of the bridesmaids’ gowns was “stunning,” made of gold and cream damask fabric, with a fitted bodice and a very full skirt. “They weren’t anything we’d ever wear again, and [the bride] knew that,” but they looked gorgeous during the wedding. Anderson figured she’d hang onto hers in case she one day had a daughter who’d wear it for “dress-up.”

So it languished in her closet, until one day when she was helping decorate her country club for the holidays. “We had only a skimpy, cheap tree skirt and no budget” to buy something more fitting for the majestic 15-foot Christmas tree.

Then it dawned on her: That fitted skirt from her bridesmaid’s gown would make an elegant tree skirt, and the colors would match the club’s gold holiday decorations. So she raced home and gave the skirt “a good tug” and it came apart from the top of the dress. The pleats around the fitted bodice made a perfect fit around the tree. The zipper even made it easy to lay it out.

“It was the perfect tree skirt,” she said. “I felt like Charlie Brown with his blanket around the tree!”

It worked so well that she took a “shimmery green” bridesmaid’s dress from her college roommate’s wedding and cut it into a tree skirt for her own Christmas tree.

She had one other bridesmaid’s dress — a mint green number — from another sister-in-law’s wedding, but it wasn’t suitable for holiday dÉcor. “I couldn’t use it for anything, so that’s gone.”

She said she doesn’t know whether any of her bridesmaids still have the dresses from her own wedding, but she realized they’d be perfect for tree skirts as well. “They were this silver.... They’d be beautiful!” In fact, she said, warming to the task, if they weren’t used as tree skirts, they’d be perfect as a table covering.

For the record, Anderson makes her living at this kind of thing. She owns Teacups and Tassles, a home decorating store in Barrington that specializes in custom window treatments.

CHRISTIAN POPE CAMPBELL of East Greenwich could use some creative ideas for the many gowns she’s collected over the years. She’s appeared in 13 weddings as everything from flower girl to maid of honor.

“I’ve got some ugly dresses,” she said, laughing. But she has some practical ones, as well. She said the best bridesmaid dress she ever wore was a conservative black cocktail dress from Talbot’s that she wore as a bridesmaid for one of her college friends. It was so tasteful it would have been perfect to wear to other events. But unfortunately, her dear grandmother died the weekend of that wedding, so she couldn’t bring herself to wear the dress again “because it brought back very sad memories for me.”

The single worst dress she had to wear was from the 1980s, a slip dress with a lace overlay. “This dress was fuschia — and I mean fuschia, all fuschia, full length with gigantic poofy sleeves that looked like big marshmallows around the upper arm.” The dress cost more than $300, she said, “and there was no way I was ever going to wear that dress again.”

That said, Campbell admits that she personally contributed to bridesmaids’ horror stories with her choice of gowns for her own bridesmaids — each dress looked like “a big table cloth.” They were made from a fabric patterned with huge wisteria flowers. “Not small, petite flowers, but literally giant flowers, like hydrangeas,” she said, cringing. “At the time, I thought it was so perfect. It just seemed such an appropriate dress. But when I look back at the pictures, I think, “I can’t believe I did that to my bridesmaids.”

Perhaps it should have been a clue when her mother, who served as her maid of honor, refused to wear it, saying it would make her “throw up.” She had a dress made of solid blue to match, instead.

TODAY, BRIDESMAIDS DRESSES ACTUALLY aren’t as appalling as they used to be, according to local bridal shops. “There’s definitely the old traditional styles, but there’s a lot more than we ever used to have that’s more versatile, more flexible, more friendly for other occasions,” said Toni McGee, district manager for the national chain David’s Bridal, which has stores in Warwick and North Attleboro.

“We’re more trendy, more fashion-forward than we used to be,” she said. “The market demands it. That’s just the way the styles are…. There are so many choices now.”

The brides themselves are becoming more avant-garde with their choices, adding splashes of color to the traditional white and ivory wedding gowns. And tea-length dresses have become popular, for brides and their attendants. They’re still formal, but not as formal as the full-length wedding gowns.

McGee figures that half of the brides served by her stores still favor the traditional long gown with matching dresses for the bridesmaids, while the other half want anything from casual to fashionably chic. “There are no rules. You can do whatever you want to make your day special and to fulfill your dream.”

That doesn’t mean there won’t be bad bridesmaid dresses, she stressed. “You’re still going to have a couple of dresses that you’re not going to like. Not every dress is for everybody. . . . But I think the chances of you liking your dress is much greater than it used to be.”

Tricia Philbin, whose family runs the Wishing Well bridal boutique in East Providence, agreed. Gone are the days of ugly dresses, she said. “Now, they’re so not like that.” Brides, she said, are thinking out of the box.

IN THAT SPIRIT, some brides sincerely do try to find outfits that their attendants will want to wear again. A handful of readers said they told their bridesmaids to wear whatever they wanted, as long as it was a certain color — usually black.

Maryann Dember of Cranston said her daughter, Melissa Siple of East Greenwich, invited her attendants — a maid of honor and three bridesmaids — to go to a store together to pick out something they liked.

The women were all different sizes and shapes, Dember recalled, so her daughter didn’t want to force any one style on them. “I think she had seen too many bad dresses,” Dember said, and she didn’t want to be one of those “brides who turn into what they call ‘Bridezilla’.”

The four young women settled on blue velvet pant suits for the October wedding, and then wore them again for the holidays. So everyone was happy, she said.

Meanwhile, Dember and her daughter also heard about local schools collecting used bridesmaids dresses and prom gowns to be given to underprivileged girls who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford nice dresses for their proms and other formal occasions.

So last year, they began collecting gowns — more than two dozen so far — that they’ve passed along to the private Wheeler School in Providence and Cranston High School East, both of which have programs donating dresses to students who need them.

As for Bleama Forman of Warwick, she said her daughter told her bridesmaids to wear whatever they wanted to for her wedding, as long as they dressed in black and white.

“I guess she felt that she didn’t want someone to go out and spend $100 on a dress that they might never wear again,” Forman said.

Forman should know. She has served as a bridesmaid four times over the years. She kept each of those gowns and made sure she wore them again, usually to other weddings.

After all, she said, “If you can wear them more than once, you get your money’s worth.”

Deb Newhall of Providence was costume supervisor for 27 Dresses.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

When asked, Deb Newhall flaunts bad fashion. See for yourself: 27 Dresses.

The new film, which was shot in Rhode Island, is about a perpetual bridesmaid who has a closet full of unsightly dresses to prove it. Newhall, who lives in Providence, served as the movie’s costume supervisor, overseeing the making of many of its dresses.

“They’re all slightly horrifying,” Newhall says. “People, when they’re asked to be a bridesmaid, cringe because they think they’ll have to wear a horrible dress. And this is just one nutty dress after another.”

Newhall was just doing her job, which involved more than some people might imagine.

“My job is to support the actors, the words and the story. If you notice the clothing too much, that can be distracting.”

Newhall didn’t design the 27 dresses in 27 Dresses. Catherine Marie Thomas, the movie’s costume designer, did that. However, Newhall was in charge of the movie’s other dresses, including those used in more than a half dozen weddings depicted in the film, from one with a 1980s pink theme to one based on Gone With the Wind, and its big hoop dresses.

“They were grand and silly, but not period pieces. They were bridesmaid dresses. They were all pastels and Easter egg colors. They were wacky.”

Newhall worked with the costume designer. She organized and scheduled the movie’s sewing shop, which employed three seamstresses, four on one particularly demanding day, making costumes available as needed, and amending them as necessary.

“The director may say, ‘Should we make that crazier? Can you do something more to it?’ ”

Cut, color, texture could all be altered. And in a film about fashion, you’d think fashion would be inordinately important, but it’s not.

“It was certainly a show about clothing. But every show is about clothing to some extent. It’s about what looks correct and appropriate for the character.”

Newhall thinks of her job as not merely clothing characters, but creating them.

“It’s never just the clothes. You are working closely with the actors and director to finesse and find the true core of the character. Sometimes the actors don’t know who they really are until they see what they look like in their wardrobe. You’ve understood the characters and help the actors understand them.”

THIS IS QUITE AN UNDERTAKING for a book illustrator. That was Newhall’s major decades ago at the Rhode Island School of Design.

“The last thing I was interested in was fashion. Even now, my interest is not in contemporary clothing.”

While at RISD, Newhall rediscovered her love for theater and participated in some productions, making costumes. After graduation, this led her to doing the same at Trinity Rep, where years earlier she had become intrigued by the theater. Newhall, while a student at North Kingstown High School, participated in Trinity’s “Project Discovery” program that introduced students to theater.

“It was one of the most valuable programs ever. That really got to me and stayed with me. It shaped my life.”

Newhall worked at Trinity when Adrian Hall was its artistic director.

“It was one of the most memorable times I’ve had in theater. It inspired me.”

With a “love of fabrics and history and researching and digging into a story,” Newhall decided to leave book illustration behind and pursue a master’s degree in costume design at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She taught at Brandeis and Brown. She designed costumes for local theaters, including Theatre-by-the-Sea in Matunuck, for commercials and for films, including Michael Corrente’s American Buffalo, and for TV shows such as Zoom and the first season of Brotherhood.

“Costume design is more about telling a story and illustrating characters. You have to be aware of fashion to be a costume designer, but I deal with all different time periods. I’m interested in clothing in how it relays a story.”

RIGHT NOW, NEWHALL IS working as the costume designer for the film Hachiko: A Dog’s Story, which is being shot in Rhode Island and stars Richard Gere.

“My phone is ringing, which is good. I can’t do everything, but this is one project to pay attention to. It’s a good story with good people. It has the things that make a movie attractive to me.”

Newhall describes 27 Dresses as cute, comic and silly. And she says that as its costume supervisor, she’s one of the first to speak in the film, albeit tacitly, when women appear wearing sparkling material, bright colors and short hem lines.

“You get a smile on your face. You just know it’s not a serious film. The clothing telegraphs an enormous amount of information before anyone opens their mouth.”

lkirk@projo.com