Fashion was sadness, it became a wedding! Why is it customary to get married in white today?

Previously in Europe, white was considered the color of sadness. Therefore, noble ladies who observed mourning were often called white ladies. In such conditions, not every fashionista was ready to try on a white dress for a wedding.

Girls only got married in the most beautiful dresses they had. The rulers preferred red clothes and richly decorated them with embroidery, lace, precious stones, etc.

Queen Victoria managed to dispel forever the mourning association around this color. As a true trendsetter of her time, she decided to go against established norms and wore a snow-white outfit on her wedding day.

Victoria wasn’t the first to wear white to a wedding. So in 1499, Anne of Brittany, then Duchess of Brittany and Queen of France, married for the second time wearing white, shocking the people and her fiance Louis XII. of Valois. The fact is that her previous husband Charles VIII. he had died only a year earlier and Anna was still mourning him. For her second wedding, she therefore chose mourning white.

Almost 200 years later, in 1613, Elizabeth Stuart, the Anglo-Scottish princess, also decided to shock the public with a snow-white wedding dress embroidered with silver lace and studded with diamonds and pearls. The bridesmaids also had similar dresses.

But back to Victoria. For her wedding to Prince Albert, the girl chose a cream-colored silk satin dress with a narrow waist, a full skirt and a Honiton lace trim. When ordering the outfit, she had little idea that in a few decades this style would become a classic of European wedding fashion.

Why did Victoria manage to bring the color white into fashion? First, the Queen was the trendsetter of the time. Secondly, an unplanned PR campaign started around the wedding dress. The fact is that in the 19th century it was not the custom to get rid of the wedding dress immediately after the ceremony, as we do now, so the queen appeared in public several times in her wedding dress, but without a veil and with a veil. less festive atmosphere. Partly due to this, partly due to the influence of the queen herself, the popularity of white as a wedding color grew in the world of fashion. In addition, it had another rather utilitarian, but useful feature: it looked advantageous in the black and white photographs of the time.

A little later, Hollywood stars helped to consolidate the special status of the white wedding dress. So in 1956, Grace Kelly posed hand-in-hand with her husband, Prince Rainier III of Monaco, in a gorgeous white dress made of silk, lace, tulle and pearl threads.

In 1981, millions of viewers watched the wedding ceremony of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, dressed in a magnificent dress from the hands of David and Elizabeth Emanuel – ivory silk taffeta with a train of almost eight meters.

One cannot help but remember Audrey Hepburn and her luxurious Balmain midi dress in which she married Mel Ferrer.

Today, a wedding in white is a tradition. Many girls who do not want to follow the rules, on the contrary, dress in bright non-standard dresses in order to look original in wedding pictures. However, most brides still prefer the classics.

Another interesting point: the tradition of closing the couture show with a wedding look. It was created around the middle of the twentieth century, when wealthy clients began to often turn to their favorite designers for exclusive wedding dresses, and they, in turn, began to include them in spring-summer collections. Some of these dresses have even become iconic.

Text: Daria Montenegro

Photo: Getty Images