Vintage wedding fashion

One of the lovely things about genealogy is that you can stretch the definition of family history almost infinitely, to encompass all sorts of little trips down other routes to pursue things that interest you. So today, in a link up with the lovely Celfunte Costumes and Couture, I'm thinking about changing wedding fashion. Famously, white weddings were popularised by the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert in 1840, when she wore a white dress and veil, trimmed with orange blossom.

Painting by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1847
Original is in the Royal Collection

Victoria herself described the dress as 'an imitation of an old design'; it was, in fact, something of a political piece - the silk satin was woven in Spitalfields and the lace flounces and veil were from Honiton and Beer, in Devon. The train was 18 feet long and became a fashion statement in its own right! This was a wedding dress designed to show support for British cottage industry and became a talking point for years. The orange blossom was to signify fertility (met with horror by some sections of Victorian society) and led to a craze for orange-blossom weddings, where society newspapers were quick to record that real orange blossoms had been used. Poorer brides with aspirations had to make do with wax replicas.

Wedding fashion can be a funny thing; is it led by Royal weddings, or do they follow the prevailing fashion and magnify it for others to see better?

When Princess Mary of Teck married the future George V in 1893, her dress was very different from Victoria's. The Times described the occasion thus:

"It is to the strains of the Bridal march from Lohengrin that Princess Mary enters. the observed of all observers in the most literal sense. With downcast eyes and a flush on her cheeks she looks exquisitely pretty. Her dress of silver and white brocade with its ingeniously clustered shamrocks, roses and thistles is at once simple and elegant. There is no train, or at all events, none that hampers the bride's movement, while a plain court bodice shows off her finely-moulded figure to perfection. The bridal veil of fine old Honiton point is caught back off the face, and trails and clusters of orange blossoms, together with the inevitable bouquet of white flowers carried in her hand, complete the salient points of the bride's appearance." Observation of The Times, 8 July 1893

(c) The Royal Collection / Historic Royal Palaces

Now compare this with a middle-class wedding from 1901 - the dress silhouette is very similar, although higher in the neck, and the bride carries white flowers with similar blossoms in her hair.

The group photograph was a sea of enormous hats!

This is, I think, how many of us picture historic wedding clothing - stern-faced gentlemen and serious-but-happy brides. A wedding was an opportunity to make a statement about how prosperous and populous a family was, to show them to their best advantage while celebrating the happy union of one family to another and the creation of a new family unit. Of course, this did not always require huge dresses and massive group photographs:

but the huge hat was clearly still popular even in the late 1930s! At least the happy couple were allowed to smile by then. Celfunte Costumes and Couture is currently hosting a retrospective on Vintage Wedding fashion here - pop along and have a look!