Rag Trade Sisters : Weddings of the past, and the Victoria effect

Morag requested that we devote a few posts to the subject of wedding fashion, and so I volunteered to do one from a historical point-of-view. As so often the only clothes that survive are those of high-ranking people, I am throwing in some Royal Weddings as well.

I find it fascinating that wedding dresses didn't used to be white. Often they were just the best dress that you had or could make, and you would use it again after your wedding. I was fascinated to learn, when I visited the new Robert Burns museum in Ayr, that his wife's wedding dress had been black! He bought 15 yards of black lusterine (a twilled cotton in imitation of silk) from a Glasgow merchant, and they were married in 1788. The dress does not survive, but a swatch of the material miraculously survived in the hands of a descendant who lives in America. The swatch of silk is now in the museum in Ayr.

The swatch of material.

Perhaps the dress may have looked something like this!

The following picture is from the 1970s series "Poldark". Although their costuming isn't always spot-on (it takes frightful flights of fancies sometimes, though some of it I do love, however inaccurate), I love that they didn't put Elizabeth in a white dress, for indeed, in this period (much the same as that when Robert Burns and Jean Armour wed) they did not wear white.

The following two gowns are from the Regency era:

Here's where the Royals start creeping in. This was the dress of Princess Charlotte, daughter of Prince Regent Edward of England. The dress has silver thread!

A close-up, capturing the lustrous feel of the gown.

Next we skip to Queen Victoria, who was married in 1840. It is generally believed that Victoria laid down the law on white wedding dresses, and we haven't diverged very far from that since.

Victoria's actual wedding dress. There was originally lace on the skirt, but sadly it was removed and reused for other gowns.

A beautiful portrait of Victoria in her wedding dress. Notice the lace!

There are many royal weddings, of course, but for the sake of simplicity and the size of the post, I'm sticking with the Brits.

I'm skipping ahead again - to 1923, when Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, married King George VI. A prototype of this dress was auctioned off in 2011 and sold for £3,500!

The dress on display.

Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mother in her wedding dress.

Queen Elizabeth the second was married in 1947. Apparently, hundreds of girls sent her their ration coupons in order for her to have a dress.

Perhaps one of the most famous of royal wedding dresses was that of Princess Diana, who married Prince Charles in 1981. It had a 25-foot long train! It is an interesting dress fashion-wise, as it seems to combine the large sleeves of the 1890s (the puffed sleeves that Anne of Green Gables was so wild about) with the large, crinolined skirt of the 1850s or 1860s.