Wedding Dresses and Groom's Outfits before the Whiteout (2024)

This spring, Vera Wang shocked fashionistas everywhere with a line of red bridal dresses.

But was Wang really breaking with tradition?

The white wedding gown so many brides insist on wearing today is very much a newcomer in western culture. Before the late nineteenth century, bridal dresses came in a riot of colors---and even patterns, with some brides wearing stripes, plaids, checks, or paisleys.

Weddings have always been seen as important rituals so new clothes for brides and grooms have been the ideal.

Obviously, poor peasants in pre-industrial Europe and later working-class people in industrialized Europe and America often found it difficult, if not impossible, to buy special clothes for their wedding.

But for those who could afford it, weddings were elaborate and expensive celebrations. In fact, the wealthy usually spent more money on their weddings than on christenings and burials. Wedding clothes, for both bride and groom, were an integral part of the festivities.

Marriages were about the exchange of property between two families. Many weddings highlighted overt displays of wealth during the ceremony itself and elaborate dresses were an easy way to underscore one’s wealth. In 1552, for example,one German bride spent over 200 gulden on her wedding clothes and presents, a sum that significantly exceeded the amount several laborers would earn over the course of a year.

We don’t know whatthis bride'sdress looked like but we do know that her dress would probably have been a gift from her groom. Along with the conventional gift of a ring (which was not always worn on the “ring finger”), wealthy grooms might give their brides jewelry and household goods. The dress the bride wore would serve as her best dress for some time. For women who married young, this could cause problems. In the medieval French satirical poem, The Fifteen Joys of Marriage, a woman complains that she has nothing to wear to important events:

“I still have only my wedding gown, and that is faded and very short because I have grown since it was made, for I was still only a child when I was given to you,” she bemoans.

While her dress was “faded,” it was probably not white. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, colors had symbolic meanings and wedding dresses were made in a range of colors.

Blue was a popular choice as it represented chastity but brides could also choose green, red,yellowor any other color.

Although today, we associate white with purity, it had multiple meanings during this period. While it might represent purity and innocence it was also used, along with black, for mourning.

Despite this link with mourning, wealthy medieval and Renaissance brides did not avoid wearing white or even having white adornments on their wedding gowns.

In Renaissance Italy, in an attempt to control social climbing, sumptuary laws restricted the kind of clothing people wore. These laws grudgingly allowed brides, “if they wish,” to have “borders of pearls on their wedding dress.” But they were allowed to wear pearls only once---and only on their wedding gowns.

Obviously, royalty could do as they please. When Mary, Queen of Scots, married for the first time, she wore “clothing as white as lilies.” She also wore diamonds, rubies, and other gems.

Several years earlier, when Henry VIII’s daughter, Mary Tudor, married Philip of Spain, the two of them wore matching outfits of white cloth of gold (white cloth embroidered with gold thread). The visual connection between their outfits served to underscore their personal and political union.

This tradition---of matching outfits---crossed the ocean and became a part of American culture as well. In 1780 a wealthy bride in New York wore a blue damask petticoat while her groom sported a matching waistcoat. She and her groom then followed a common tradition by wearing their wedding clothes the next Sunday in church.

This bride’s choice of color and cloth signaled her position as a member of a fashionable elite. During the eighteenth century, blue was one of the more popular colors for British and American brides. But brides also wore red, green, and other colors, throughout this period.

In 1816, when the heir to the British throne, Princess Charlotte married, she avoided the vivid colors of her peers, making an even bigger splash with the fabric she chose.

La Belle Assemblee, the leading fashion magazine of the day, gushed over Charlotte’s choice: “Her dress was silver lama [lamé] on net, over a silver tissue slip, embroidered at the bottom with silver lama in shells and flowers. Body and sleeves to correspond, elegantly trimmed with point Brussels lace. The manteau [overcoat] was of silver tissue lined with white satin, with a border of embroidery to answer that on the dress, and fastened in front with a splendid diamond ornament.”

Torn between warring parents who loathed one another, Charlotte looked forward with great anticipation to her own marriage and escape from her father’s control. Unfortunately, she died in childbirth in 1817, sparking a frenzy among her father’s brothers who now rushed to provide Britain with a new prince or princess of Wales.

The new heir to the throne, Alexandrina Victoria, was born two years after Charlotte’s death. She is often credited with changing wedding fashions dramatically when she married Prince Albert in 1840 while wearing a white wedding dress.

Charming as this story is, women did not switch over en masse to white after Victoria’s wedding.

By the time Victoria married, the mass production of textiles had lowered the cost of fabrics. However, the cost of making a dress remained high, with the result that a woman’s wedding dress continued to serve as her best dress during the early years of her marriage.

Since wedding dresses would be used for years, many young women planned for this dress long in advance, collecting swatches and debating materials. The swatch collections of these women include checks, plaids, and even paisleys, indicating that they dreamt, not of white dresses, but rather of dresses with elaborate patterns.

Mass produced patterned textiles were relatively inexpensive and therefore within the reach of many middle-class consumers. For brides, they had the added bonus of ensuring a distinctive dress, the dream of brides everywhere.

When Eliza Barret, “a pretty Kentucky girl,” married her wealthy husband in 1846, she wore a “changeable silk that shimmered from gold to blue...[with] a white bonnet tied in a great bow under her pretty chin.” Marrying nearly ten years later, her younger sister wore a “wide-skirted, white, silk gown.”

While this shift may have epitomized a growing trend toward white dresses, the different colors may have simply reflected the distinctive color preferences of the two women. It may also have stemmed from the fact that one woman was married in the afternoon, when the wearing of colored dresses was more common.

The most significant change during the 1840s was not in the color of the gown but rather in its structure. In the first half of the nineteenth century, wedding gowns among wealthy women were often semi-décolleté evening gowns which exposed the neck. The dresses typically had short sleeves and brides usually wore long gloves.

Beginning in the 1840s, a gradual move away from the evening gown style began. By the late nineteenth century, wealthy women were opting for high-necked long sleeved gowns which were much more demure than those worn by their mothers and grandmothers.

Increasingly, the gowns of these women were white.

But this shift was not absolute. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, middle-class and working-class women continued to use their wedding dresses as their best dress.

When Laura Ingalls Wilder married in 1885, she wore a black cashmere dress. Her decision to wear black cashmere was driven, in part, by the need to push forward the wedding (to avoid unwanted guests)---she wore a dress that she and her mother were already engaged in making. But even if she had had time to make a new dress for the wedding, she would probably not have chosen a white dress.

Wilder was typical of the brides of her period. They may not have worn black but many chose dark colors as these were simply more practical.

During the 1920s, as wedding gowns became shorter and a mass consumer culture emerged, brides of all classes began to wear white dresses specially created for their wedding. These dresses reflected a growth in disposable income among many Americans and Europeans.

In the years that followed, the Depression and war led many women to revert to the practical and inexpensive customs of their grandmothers, simply wearing a “good dress” on their wedding day.

After World War II, prosperity and a desire for normalcy created a boom in weddings as returning GIs and their “girls” rushed to the altar. Weddings now became big business. Magazines catering to brides emerged (Brides, for example, was founded in 1959) and stores focusing solely on bridal attire opened. The ubiquitous David’s Bridal opened in 1950.

Elaborate white dresses, worn once, became a central part of this ritual. For those in the wedding business, ensuring that the bridal dress was unique and so distinctive that it could be worn only once made good business sense.

In the years since, the white wedding dress has reigned supreme.

But as marital traditions shift to include same sex couples, non-western traditions, and the very personal tastes of brides who are typically older than those of the 1950s and 1960s, bridal dress may shift yet again.

Red may become the new white.