Just to recap, I had a very dear old friend, well two dear friends, get married recently (they aren't all that old ... late twenties). I also have a cousin who is getting married later this month, and that trip will take me to Charlotte, North Carolina, which I am trying to tell myself will be fun, a chance to see relatives and sample at least one local (and blog about it, using lobby cards from A Woman in Grey as illustrations).
Anyhow, back to weddings. Cristen and Molly stated, at one point, that wedding dresses tend to follow contemporary fashion trends, which is totally true. However, Molly posited that, for example, in a 1970's wedding, "...you'd wear, like, you know, a mini, just like you would wear to go... shopping? Wherever you wear your mini's?" Actually, not as far as I can tell. While I wasn't technically around in the seventies, I can attest to seeing the many wedding photos of not just my parents, but of many friends' parents, all of whom were married in the seventies. All I remember from those photos were long, lace-up-the-front hippy-flavored gypsy dresses. These get-ups were as ubiquitous in these photos as our dads' John Lennon hair cuts. Mini-dresses, however, not so much.
World War II also came up in the discussion. Both sets of grandparents were married during that era, though neither (as far as I can tell) were married in a dress made out of parachute silk. Grandma Kitty and Grandpa Oji-San (Mr. and Mrs. Don Lynch) managed to swing a marriage in Italy in 1944, at the height of the conflict. They were married in a baroque chapel and honeymooned in Sorrento. Sounds romantic, right? Well, for the most part it sounds like it was, but fifty years later, Grandma was a little resentful of the fact that she had to get married in her uniform. Once, when we were watching TV together, a commercial for allergy medication or something started up, and the woman on the screen professed to be so excited about getting married in her mother's wedding gown. Kitty snorted "Nobody would ever want to have been married in my wedding dress!"
My dad's parents, as I said, were also married around that time, and their wedding photo stands in marked contrast. A traditional studio portrait, it shows John Sr. in a three-piece suit and cravate, and Regina in a long, elegant dress and corresponding veil. Again, I can't say whether the dress was made of parachute silk, but I will say that it is gorgeous, understated, and encapsulates the era. Grandma Reggie has never had any pretense about being stylish (she just is) but her wedding gown looks like the equivalent of something Worth or Dior were turning out at the time.
According to Cristen and Molly, the first recorded wedding white wedding dress was that of Queen Victoria I of England. This does actually sound like something I've hear somewhere before, so therefore it must be true. Apparently, Old Vic was the the first bride to have bridesmaids carry her train. My friend Jessie, who just got married, did not have an expansive train as part of her gorgeous gown, but she did work for a company three years ago that was bonding The Young Victoria, an Emily Blunt-starring hoop-skirt-straviganza that needs to come out already (seriously, it's been like three years). So, Jessie's wedding and former job are my connections to the late British monarch and the work of Sandy Powell.
The above photograph was found at a new discovery, the blog Jane Austen's World, which has a lovely illustrated article about weddings from November of last year, titled "Regency Wedding Dresses and Later Developments in Bridal Fashions."http://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com
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