In January, Tessa Tookes tried on her dream wedding dress at a bridal boutique in Ontario. When the store employees told her she would have to pay $200 for the bra cups of the gown to match her skin color, her heart sank. The beige cups that had already been built into the dress, however, were free. Ivory cups were also a free option.
Ms. Tookes, who is Black, loved the dress so much that she put down a deposit for half the price of the gown. But when she returned home, she had time to process what had happened.
“When the dust settled a week later, I was like, I probably don’t want to wear this dress anymore,” Ms. Tookes, 28, said. “It just feels kind of icky and wrong.”
When her fiancé, Joey Kirchner, 34, learned about the incident, he expressed his outrage on their joint TikTok account, in a video that has received more than 4.5 million views and 12,000 comments. “So you’re telling me that it’s free to be white?” Mr. Kirchner, an actor and model, said in the video.
In an interview, Mr. Kirchner, who is white, added, “Why is the standard ‘nude’ a ‘nude’ that would match my skin tone?”
