A Most Beguiling Accomplishment

So, previously  I showed you a lot of examples of actual white or white-ish gowns worn for weddings, including fashion plates (as they are intended to be prescriptive of real clothing - they exist to tell you what you can/should wear); these prove at least that white was worn. Now I'm going to follow that up with the kind of sources that can tell us more about the reasons white gowns were chosen, and whether the examples found previously are representative. The Commonness of Bridal White Although fictional weddings are by definition not real, the choices that authors and artists make can show what's considered normal or at least ideal for their societies, and the majority of authors and artists I found chose to dress their brides in white. The marriage (ha!) of both textual and visual sources can be found in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1742) and Joseph Highmore's painted illustrations of the same. Happily, the book describes what she wears in order to get marri...

The history of white wedding dresses is a popular topic, and a few related narratives have built up in both popular and academic writing: Queen Victoria was the first to wear a white gown for her wedding in 1840, and women began to copy her, creating a tradition. Queen Victoria was not the first to wear a white wedding dress, but it experienced a boom in popularity as a result of her marriage. Queen Victoria was not the first to wear a white wedding dress, but it was only with her marriage that it took on the connotations of purity and innocence. I could digress to talk about the perils of "Great Man" history, but that's  better for a discussion on Chanel (hey-o!), so instead let's just look at why these narratives are all incorrect, and why Victoria was not really a turning point at all. (For the use of white, that is - Cele Otnes and Elizabeth Pleck make a very convincing argument in Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding  that Victoria's wedd...

The Facebook discussion on my last blog post was really helpful - it made me realize that I should have been much  more explicit about what I was discussing regarding timeframe and class level, and I plan to update the other post to reflect that in a bit. But I also thought it would be worthwhile to talk about the situations where my suggestion is not useful, for balance (and because it lets me talk about the early 18th century, i.e. the best part of the 18th century). To recap and clarify: my point was that portraits and images of fine clothes from the 1750s, 1760s, and early 1770s (in the Anglo-American, British, and French contexts) generally show women with gown, petticoat, and stomacher made of one fabric, and that when they are not all the same, you are more likely to see the stomacher not match the other two than a petticoat that contrasts with a matching gown and stomacher, and that the stomacher and petticoat matching each other and contrasting with the gown is an even r...