The Dress a Queen Chose

On 10 February 1840, in the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace, Queen Victoria married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. She was twenty and had been on the throne for less than three years, and she made a decision about her clothes that most weddings in the English-speaking world still follow.

She wore white. A dress of white satin, trimmed with a deep flounce of Honiton lace made by hand in Devon at a time when the craft was losing ground to machine lace, and a wreath of orange blossom in her hair where a monarch might have worn a crown.

It helps to know what she was not doing.

She was not following a rule. Royal brides before her had usually married in silver or in rich colours, often under heavy robes of state. Nor was she following a popular custom. A woman of ordinary means married in her best dress, which might be blue, grey, brown or patterned, and wore it again on Sundays and at other people's weddings for years. A dress made for one day was a luxury of the rich, and a white one, which showed every mark and could not easily be cleaned, was a luxury twice over.

That is what the colour first said. Not innocence: money, and a queen's taste.

Then the copying began. Engravings of the wedding were sold and reprinted, the ladies' magazines described the dress, and the white gown spread through the aristocracy and then into the prosperous middle class. Nine years after the wedding, in 1849, the American magazine Godey's Lady's Book told its readers that custom had decided, from the earliest ages, that white was the most fitting colour for a bride, an emblem of the purity of girlhood.

Read that sentence again with the date in mind. A fashion nine years old is described as ancient, and a meaning it did not originally carry is presented as its reason.

This is the pattern the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger collected in The Invention of Tradition in 1983: practices that are recent, or recently revived, presented as continuous with a remote past so that they borrow the authority of the past. Their examples were mostly national and political, the Highland kilt and the ceremonial of the British monarchy among them. The white wedding belongs on the list.

The colour itself never had a single fixed meaning in Europe. When Mary, Queen of Scots married the French dauphin in Paris in 1558, she wore white, which was then a colour of royal mourning in France. A colour can mean grief in one century and girlhood in another, which is one reason to doubt anyone who tells you what it has always meant.

Nor did the change happen quickly. Through the nineteenth century most brides in Britain and America still married in their best dress, white or not, because most families could not afford a garment for one day. The white dress worn once became the majority practice only in the twentieth century, and especially after the Second World War, when cheaper fabrics, rising incomes and a growing wedding trade put it within reach. The queen's choice took about a hundred years to become everybody's.

Something similar is happening now, further east. Many Chinese weddings include both a white Western gown and a red dress, red being the older colour of good fortune there, and the bride changes during the day. The Victorian fashion arrived as an addition to an existing custom rather than a replacement for it, which is how imported traditions usually travel.

None of this makes a white dress a mistake. A custom does not need to be old to be worth keeping, and the reasons people choose white now are their own.

The useful habit is to separate three things that the word tradition runs together: how old a practice is, what it originally meant, and what it means to the people doing it today. For the white dress the answers are a little under two centuries, money and royal taste, and whatever the bride decides.