Wedding Dresses

History Of Wedding Dresses

When we say wedding dress we refer to a dress or gown as clothing that women wear while being brides during a wedding celebration. The importance and style are rendered by the culture and religion of each country where the wedding takes place. Therefore different cultures delimit in the history of wedding dresses. Taking for instance the Western culture we meet, starting with the period that follows the medieval era, wedding dresses that were made mostly to reflect the status of the families that belonged to the bride and groom. It is known that in that period weddings meant very often a union between two families or two countries which ended up as an act of political interest than an act of love. Therefore brides were supposed to wear very rich and expensive fabrics, such as velvet and silk, for their wedding dress defining in this way their high status in the society of their times.

Later, over the centuries, brides have maintained the same pattern; the ones that could afford paying amounts of money for their wedding dress didn’t refrain from creating such a dress, whereas the ones from lower social classes used to wear their best dresses for going to church, since they were also white especially for the communions, white as a color being considered purity and virginity for the girls at their first communion.

In our days wedding dresses vary in style and design, there isn’t one type (regardless of color, fabrics or embellishments) of wedding dress a bride would want to wear and not find it available either on websites or bridal shops. The tradition of wearing a veil however got lost in time although there are brides who still choose to wear it as a decoration for their hairstyle.

The history of wedding dresses in the Eastern culture reveals red colored wedding dresses, especially in China, India – the ‘sari’, and Vietnam, as red was considered to be the color for good luck and auspiciousness, compared to the Western belief that rd was the color worn by prostitutes.  Nowadays many brides do not adhere to this red color any more, choosing instead other colors, such gold colored wedding dress or white as the ones in the Western culture. The weddings in South India have traditional white or cream-colored saris, whereas in Japan the brides change their dresses two or three times during a wedding ceremony, the main piece in this celebration is the white kimono and other colored dresses as the sequential attires.

The Native American culture displays varying traditions in regard to the wedding dresses, the Hopi brides wore two white wedding robes of which one was white with red stripes at top and bottom and tied with large belt. A Pueblo bride had as a wedding dress a cotton garment tied above her right shoulder and a belt around her waist. The other tribes had bridal dresses woven in colors that had a certain significance to the native people together with jewelry worn both by the bride and groom.

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