Carrying in a dress | Part 2

Carrying in a dress part 2:

In this post I want to specifically address holster placement when carrying between 10-2 in a dress, and the potential for wedge use.

In the last post we talked about how the shape of your dress can play a pretty key role in your success with carrying this way AND we talked about drawing from this position in this kind of clothing.

Now let’s talk about placement. Typically when I’m carrying around my waist in a pair of jeans I try to align the top of my Enigma with the top of my pant’s waistline. This often means that my Enigma is positioned higher on my waist, between my hip bones and my rib cage. This can be tricky with low waisted pants, as rise isn’t the most ideal for concealment, which is why I like being able to move my gun independently from my waistband.

When I’m carrying in a dress, typically my goal is to move the gun down as much as I can while still giving myself full range of motion.

Since I’m placing it so far down, I start to run into my pelvic bone, which can get uncomfortable when bending over, so sometimes it can be more ideal for comfort, concealment and mobility to move the entire gun slightly off center into what’s called your “inguinal crease”.

The reason I place my gun as low as possible is because that allows me to reduce some amount of travel from the bottom of my garment to my hand reaching my gun. The higher up my gun is, the further I have to clear my dress, and the more potential for fumbling my draw. It’s also most concealable in this position for me, because of the shape of the dress. An a-line dress gets wider as it gets to the hemline, which gives me a generous amount of material to flow over my gun. Keep in mind that your mileage may vary depending on body shape and dress choice.

Some dresses aren’t quite as forgiving, and the grip of the gun can still cause some amount of printing. That’s when I will start using a wedge. Typically a wedge causes too much below the belt printing for me, but in a dress there’s no such thing as below the belt printing! Adding a wedge (to the slide side of my holster) is typically my final step in dialing in concealment for carrying appendix in a dress.