For just about any dance outfit, flowers of some sort have become an essential accessory. While it is typical to see girls walking around with a small assortment of flowers wrapped around their wrists, the new look is a bundle of hand-held flowers as more and more people are leaning more towards flower bouquets over the average corsage.
While scrolling through TikTok and Instagram looking for my yearly dance transition sound and going through previous dance pictures, I come across girls holding a bouquet in front of them as they stand, posed perfectly beside their dates. Over the past year or so, I have seen more and more people using bouquets for their dance flowers, and while at first, I thought this was a bit excessive, some factors of having hand-held flowers put them above the average corsage.
Although corsages are nice because they sit, out of the way, perfectly strung around the wrist, I always feel like they are never really seen. As someone who loves flowers and thinks that they add more to the pictures and overall looks themselves, they should stand out without having to be searched for. With bouquets being held in front of the ones holding them, it allows the colors of the petals to shine in the photos and can be a perfect addition to any dress.
Additionally, the band of the corsages tends to be irritating to the skin and I always end up taking them off before the night is over. This year, with a bouquet I was able to put it down at any time or leave it in the car and not have to worry about it.
Along with this, pictures almost always turn out to look awkward. No matter how comfortable you are with the people beside you, there is always the question of what angle to stand at, how to hold your arms, and what way to look. While having an array of parents with cameras standing in front of you will always present the question of where to look, by having a flower bouquet I have found the question of how to hold your arms can be easily answered.
Rather than having your arms hanging awkwardly beside you or what seems like having them flying around in all directions, one arm goes around the person beside you, and the other hand wraps around the bouquet as you hold it out and against the front of your body; the awkwardness of pictures was solved by having something to hold, making use of both arms.
The biggest selling point for my group when it came to deciding what type of flowers we would do for this year’s winter dance was that making flower bouquets would be more personal and something that we could do together. Yes, we could have avoided the mess of cutting and tying flowers together if we had just settled on corsages, but overall, it allowed us to determine what our dance flowers were going to look like and it gave us something relaxing to do as a group before we had to face the chaos of the night; making bouquets is more of a personal experience than simply having a corsage placed on your wrist is.
While I do think that the common pairing of a corsage and boutonniere gives more of a traditional dance experience, the new look of a flower bouquet has changed my overall dance experience, and I am not mad about it.
