The White Wedding Dress

Now that bear-ears.com has been launched, I have started to work on sprucing up the blog a bit. A few things have been moved around, a few thing have been added. The biggest change is that I am going to start posting a bit more regularly on topics not pertaining to me. So without further ado, I present my first feature, Hit The Books.

Note: All images that do not belong to me are properly linked. Just click the image.

The White Wedding Dress

I don't know about everyone else, but I have long wondered why the traditional wedding dress color (in Western Culture) is white. It almost seems sacrilegious wear anything but a white wedding dress. White is suppose to represent purity. It couldn't have always been like that, right?

Dresses by Threadhead

Of course not. Wedding dresses were often just the best clothes the bride owned. The more fabric the dress contained, the more wealth the bride had. Having a dyed dress also displayed wealth because only the wealthy could afford to pay for it. Before the industrial revolution, clothing was the most valuable thing a person could own.

The shift to white had to do with a royal wedding. Queen Victoria's wedding. While Queen Victoria certainly wasn't the first person to wear white, she had a large sphere of influence. Royals were the rock stars of their time. Soon after etiquette books started to recommended that white was the correct color for a wedding dress.

Although white wasn't originally the color of purity: blue was. Blue is biblically referred to as a pure color. The Israelites were to tie blue tassels on the corners of their clothing to represent their purity for the Lord [Numbers 15, 38-40]. The tradition still sticks. Brides often follow the rhyme: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Just look up "something blue" anywhere on the internet and you will get thousands of entries.

The color of your wedding dress could also influence your future. For those who may be superstitious, here is an old poem about wedding dress colors:

“Married in white, you will have chosen all right. Married in grey , you will go far away. Married in black, you will wish yourself back. Married in red, you’ll wish yourself dead. Married in blue, you will always be true. Married in pearl, you’ll live in a whirl. Married in green, ashamed to be seen, Married in yellow, ashamed of the fellow. Married in brown, you’ll live out of town. Married in pink, your spirits will sink.”