All posts tagged: weddings

The 18th century wedding dress: then, and now

The 18th century was the dawn of the modern wedding dress: it saw the first emergence of white dresses as a trend, the first dresses specifically for weddings, and it is the oldest century from which we have a reasonably large selection of extent dresses. The 18th century is also a very popular era among this blog readers, and is a stunning, and unusual (at least at the moment) era to draw dress inspiration from. So let’s look at some 18th century wedding gowns, and some more recent 18th century inspired wedding gowns. First, a complete ensemble with excellent provenance, from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. No, it’s not white. And most modern brides aren’t into bonnets, but it still has so many elements I would instantly steal as a wedding dress designer. That fabulous quilted petticoat… The pinked fabric framing the face and bust… The beautiful sleeve ruffles… Or you could just wear the dress exactly as it is, as it’s already a thing of beauty. Next, another coloured wedding dress. The shape …

Rate the wedding dress: 1890s

Published by The Dreamstress

Last week the first half dozen of you to rate Heather’s dress were madly in love with it. I thought we might have a perfect score! And then the dissenters arrived. One of you even flat out hated the design, colour, and cut. And a few more of you didn’t hate it, but thought it was blah, and that the bodice cut was frumpy. So balancing out those who loved, loved, loved it, those of you who were blah about it, and the one who hated it, the lavender outfit rated a solid 8. I guess most of you did like it! This week, it’s wedding dress week, so what do I have for you to rate? A wedding dress of course! This dress dates to the 1890s, a period by which most of the traditions that we have about wedding dresses had already ingrained themselves in the cultural psyche. Brides wore white, with veils, and carried roses for love, orange blossoms for purity, and myrtle for domestic bliss. Some things were very different from …

Queen Victoria’s wedding dress: the one that started it all

Published by The Dreamstress

When the question “Why do brides wear white” is asked, the most frequent answer is “Because Queen Victoria did”, or “to show that they are virgins.” The first answer is more or less accurate, but glosses over centuries of white wedding dresses worn before Queen Victoria’s wedding, and decades of coloured wedding dresses after her wedding, and also doesn’t explain why Victoria wore a white wedding dress. The 2nd answer is mostly rubbish and dates to the mid-20th century. Long before Victoria, white was a popular choice for wedding dresses, at least among the wealthy nobility. Weddings were usually more about political alliances and transfers of wealth than they were about romance, and so the wedding dress was just another excuse to show the wealth and culture of the brides family. Wealth could be demonstrated with jewelry (brides in some parts of Renaissance Italy, for example, wore their dowry sewn onto their dress as jewels), but textiles were also an important means to display wealth, and the more elaborate the weave of the fabric, and …