Have you ever wondered how the traditional wedding dress came to be? Wonder no more.
The first mention of a dress specifically made for a wedding comes from an ancient Chinese myth. Nor was white the colour wedding dresses in ancient times. In fact, in ancient times, there were marriages, but not weddings. Marriages were based on transactions, contracts or some other formal arrangement and celebrated with feasts once the contracts were signed. They were not romantic or even spiritual occasions.
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For most of mankind’s history, marriages were about the transfer of property, the making and bringing up of children, the protection of bloodlines and the control of women. It was a transactional affair. In ancient middle east, there were “marriage marts” where women of marriageable age were auctioned off to the highest bidder and the ones who failed to bring bids were passed off to the peasants along with a payment for her upkeep...a form of dowry.
In ancient Rome, brides wore yellow veils...the theme of bringing light and warmth to their husbands; Athenian brides wore light red, cinched with a girdle that symbolized their virginity and their new husbands were to remove in the marriage bed;Chinese brides and grooms both wore black trimmed with red over a white under-kimono and in the later Han dynasty, they wore green while the husband-to-be wore red; Japanese women traditionally wore several different colours of kimonos during the wedding day, but Shinto brides only wear white; Korean women, beginning in the 14th century wore a silk dress of three colours...red, green and yellow ( white being the colour of mourning).
The earliest recorded instance of a white wedding dress in Western culture is that of the English Princess Philippa at her wedding to the Scandinavian King Eric in 1406. She was dressed in a white tunic lined with ermine and squirrel fur. In 1558, Mary Queen of Scots wore white during her wedding to the soon-to-be King of France, despite the fact that white was a color of mourning for French queens at the time. For the next few centuries, white remained a popular but by no means obligatory color for royal weddings (Princess Charlotte, when she married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld in 1816, wore an empire-waisted dress in metallic silver lamé). White dresses did not symbolize virginity or even purity, but rather were costlier and harder to keep clean, and thus communicated the status and wealth of the wearer.
Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, no woman, not even royalty, expected to wear her wedding dress only once and then never again—an idea that would have been absurd even for the very rich before the industrial revolution. Even Queen Victoria repurposed her own wedding dress and veil for subsequent use. If a non-royal woman did have a new dress made especially for her wedding, it was likely to become her new Sunday best, either as is or in an altered or dyed state, until she wore it out or the fashions changed beyond the powers of alteration. More often than not, a woman got married in the best dress she already owned.
All of this would change for Western brides after the marriage of Queen Victoria and the industrial revolution, thanks in large part to a few new technological advances, most notably photography and the spread of illustrated magazines.
Queen Victoria set the style and colour of wedding dresses. When she married Prince Albert, she wore a light coloured dress that was cut in the style of the times. The dress was actually a champagne colour, but paintings denoted it as white, and since her style was copied by most uppercrust people, she began the tradition of a bride wearing white.
The rise of photography and women’s magazines also helped seal white as the favoured colour for a wedding dress. White looked good, crisp and clean and stood out well in photographs, particularly against the black tux of the groom. Magazines in Victorian times declared that white was a symbol of innocence and purity:
It is an emblem of the purity and innocence of girlhood, and the unsullied heart she now yields to the chosen one.”
Although white tends to still be the colour of choice for may brides, the meaning of marriage and what we expect from it has slowly changed and evolved over the centuries ( thank goodness!) and most people now marry for love, not to complete some business transaction. We have also come to expect more from our spouse besides children or upkeep...we want their companionship and caring, their emotional support and their passion. Things have changed for the better.
daily.jstor.org/...