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Wedding dress

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A white wedding dress

A wedding dress or bridal gown is the dress worn by the bride during a wedding ceremony.

In Western culture, the wedding dress is most commonly white, a tradition popularised by elites in the Victorian era after Queen Victoria wore a white dress at her wedding to Prince Albert.[1]

In Eastern cultures, such as Chinese and Indian cultures, brides will often wear red to their weddings to symbolize auspiciousness.[2]

History

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Western culture

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Historically, weddings have often symbolised a strategic union between families, businesses, kingdoms, or nations.[3] Brides were expected to dress according to their status, with women from wealthy families donning rich colours and exclusive fabrics, such as furs, velvet, and silk. Brides from lower social strata wore their best church dress on their wedding day.

Color

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A blue wedding dress from 1840

The first documented instance of a royal bride wearing a white wedding dress was that of Philippa of England. She wore a tunic with a cloak in white silk bordered with squirrel and ermine in 1406, when she married Eric of Pomerania.[4][5]

Similarly, Mary, Queen of Scots, wore a white wedding dress in 1559 when she married her first husband, Francis, the Dauphin of France.[6]

This was not a widespread trend, however: prior to the Victorian era, a bride was married in any color, black being popular in Finland.[7]

The white wedding dress gained popularity after the Queen Victoria's wedding in 1840 to Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, when Victoria wore a white gown trimmed with Honiton lace. Illustrations of the wedding were widely published[8], and many elite Victorian brides donned white dresses at their weddings.

In the early 1900s, clothing included a lot of decorations, such as lace or frills. This was also adopted in wedding dresses, where decorative frills and lace were common. For example, in the 1920s, they were typically short in the front with a longer train in the back and were worn with cloche-style wedding veils. This tendency to follow current fashions continued until the late 1960s, when it became popular to revert to long, full-skirted designs reminiscent of the Victorian era.[2]

Since the mid-20th century, white has been the dominant color for Western wedding dresses, though "wedding white" includes shades such as eggshell, ecru, and ivory.[9][10]

Eastern culture

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Traditionally, a Kurdish first-time bride would wear a red dress for her wedding to symbolize the postcoital bleeding she will experience when she loses her virginity while a Kurdish bride who used to be married before would wear pink. Many Kurds associate red wedding dresses with impoverished Kurdish rural society and it is no longer commonly worn.[11][12][13]

In India, brides wear a wedding sari. These are usually red with golden brocade, as red is the color associated with married women. Other colors appear in some regions and castes, like red-white checkering in Tamil Nadu.

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Historical Western European wedding dresses

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Wedding dresses from different areas of the world

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South Asian dresses

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Southeast Asian dresses

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Modern Western-style dresses

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See also

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References

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  1. ↑ "Why Do Brides Wear White? | Britannica". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2026-06-21.
  2. 1 2 Brennan, Summer (2017-09-27). "A Natural History of the Wedding Dress". JSTOR Daily. Retrieved 2024-10-21.
  3. ↑ Fleming, Patricia H. (June 1973). "The Politics of Marriage Among Non-Catholic European Royalty". Current Anthropology. 14: 231–249. doi:10.1086/201323. S2CID 144634148.
  4. ↑ "Wedding white doesn't mean what you think it means". Ivy Bridal Studio. 3 March 2014. Archived from the original on 11 May 2016. Retrieved 21 November 2014. Princess Philippa of England is the first recorded princess to have worn white during her wedding in 1406, with her attire consisting of a tunic and cloak in white silk, but it wasn't until Queen Mary that the white dress would explode in popularity
  5. ↑ "The History of Matrimony". Amalfi Wedding Planner. Archived from the original on 6 May 2006.
  6. ↑ "Mary, Queen of Scots' first wedding day". Madame Guillotine. 24 April 2011. Archived from the original on 23 June 2015. Retrieved 21 November 2014. Mary's choice of a white wedding dress was an unusual one, particularly as white was more traditionally worn by royal ladies when they were in dieul blanc mourning but in this as in other things the strong willed Mary may well have been an innovator, keen to not just impress her own taste on her wedding day (after all, she hadn't been allowed the privilege of choosing her groom) but also emphasise her virginity and show off her famously pale redheaded beauty, which would have been accentuated by a pure white dress.
  7. ↑ Pelo, June. "Old Marriage Customs in Finland". Sydaby.eget.net. Retrieved 19 January 2019.
  8. ↑ "Royal Weddings 1840-1947". Royal Collection Trust. Retrieved 19 January 2019.
  9. ↑ Stewart, Jude (14 February 2011). "The Bride Wore Chartreuse: Why (Most) Wedding Dresses are White". Print. Retrieved 19 January 2019.
  10. ↑ "Traditional Mexican dress · V&A". Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-21.
  11. ↑ Allison, Christine (1996). Kurdish Culture and Identity. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 154. ISBN 9781856493291.
  12. ↑ Russel, Jan (November 2007). They Lived to Tell the Tale. Lyons Press. ISBN 9781599216393.
  13. ↑ Smothers Bruni, Mary Ann (1995). Journey Through Kurdistan. Texas Memorial Museum. p. 57.
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