Historically, weddings have often symbolised a strategic union between families, businesses, kingdoms, or nations. Brides were expected to dress according to their status, with women from wealthy families donning rich colours and exclusive fabrics, such as furs, velvet, and silk. Brides from lower social strata wore their best church dress on their wedding day.
Color
A blue wedding dress from 1840
Historically, there was no specific color for a bridal dress in the Western European upper class prior to the Victorian era. The wedding dress was simply the best dress the bride owned, and it need not be of a specific color. Since a wedding dress could be of any color, there were examples of whte wedding dresses prior to the Victorian era.
The first documented instance of a royal bride wearing a white wedding dress was that of Philippa of England. She wore a tunic with a cloak in white silk bordered with squirrel and ermine in 1406, when she married Eric of Pomerania.
Similarly, Mary, Queen of Scots, wore a white wedding dress in 1559 when she married her first husband, Francis, the Dauphin of France.
This was not a widespread trend, however: prior to the Victorian era, a bride was married in any color, black being popular in Finland and the other Nordic countries, since a black dress could be worn as the best dress for any occasion after the wedding.
In the Empire period, white did become a popular color for wedding dresses in the European upper class. In 1816 the British dressmaker Eliza Gill published a white ball gown for wedding use and in 1818 the dressmaker Euphemia Macdonald pulished a white wedding dress in Ackermann’s, which has been referred to as the first white wedding dress designed specifically as a weddingdress.
However, the popularity of the white wedding dress in the Empire period was mainly because white was the most popular color in Empire fashion rather than it having become a specific wedding color.
The white wedding dress gained popularity after the Queen Victoria's wedding in 1840 to Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, when Victoria wore a white gown trimmed with Honiton lace. Illustrations of the wedding were widely published, and many elite Victorian brides donned white dresses at their weddings.
In the early 1900s, clothing included a lot of decorations, such as lace or frills. This was also adopted in wedding dresses, where decorative frills and lace were common. For example, in the 1920s, they were typically short in the front with a longer train in the back and were worn with cloche-style wedding veils. This tendency to follow current fashions continued until the late 1960s, when it became popular to revert to long, full-skirted designs reminiscent of the Victorian era.
Since the mid-20th century, white has been the dominant color for Western wedding dresses, though "wedding white" includes shades such as eggshell, ecru, and ivory.
Eastern culture
Traditionally, a Kurdish first-time bride would wear a red dress for her wedding to symbolize the postcoital bleeding she will experience when she loses her virginity while a Kurdish bride who used to be married before would wear pink. Many Kurds associate red wedding dresses with impoverished Kurdish rural society and it is no longer commonly worn.
In India, brides wear a wedding sari. These are usually red with golden brocade, as red is the color associated with married women. Other colors appear in some regions and castes, like red-white checkering in Tamil Nadu.
↑"Wedding white doesn't mean what you think it means". Ivy Bridal Studio. 3 March 2014. Archived from the original on 11 May 2016. Retrieved 21 November 2014. Princess Philippa of England is the first recorded princess to have worn white during her wedding in 1406, with her attire consisting of a tunic and cloak in white silk, but it wasn't until Queen Mary that the white dress would explode in popularity
↑"Mary, Queen of Scots' first wedding day". Madame Guillotine. 24 April 2011. Archived from the original on 23 June 2015. Retrieved 21 November 2014. Mary's choice of a white wedding dress was an unusual one, particularly as white was more traditionally worn by royal ladies when they were in dieul blanc mourning but in this as in other things the strong willed Mary may well have been an innovator, keen to not just impress her own taste on her wedding day (after all, she hadn't been allowed the privilege of choosing her groom) but also emphasise her virginity and show off her famously pale redheaded beauty, which would have been accentuated by a pure white dress.
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