Wedding rant, as promised.
I accidentally came home from the library last week with an armload of wedding books. A book about the ceremony, a book about the origins of customs, lots of books with pretty pictures. After going through them all,I slowly realized that--now that I am an adult and a bride myself-- I do not like weddings any more than I did when I was dragged to a load of them as a youngster.
I dislike stuffiness.
I dislike pretense.
Ever since I was tiny I have balked at the idea that a woman must be married in a white gown. Why? And WHY --If she's going to spend several hunderd or even a couple thousand (!) dollars on an outfit-- does she never wear it again?
Why do those wedding invitations sound to stuffy? ("Mr. and Mrs. Bride's Parents Request the Honour of your Presence at the Marriage of their daughter..." Blah blah blah.)
So, one of the books I picked up ONLY because it has a vintage photo of how I want my hair done, ended up being brilliant.
All Dressed In White: The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding by Carol McD. Wallace is a very careful observation of American wedding customs starting just before the Victorian era and ending in the present (better put: explaining the present).
The first several chapters retell stories that I'm already aware of: that our prarie grandmothers dressed in their best for thir wedding... that may be pink or blue.... laura Ingalls Wilder's wedding dress was actually black. White dresses always showed affluence (they dirtied so easily, and every sewing error shows in white worse than in patters or even other shades), and many a girl married in white.... but from what I understand, many *more* only ever dreamed of it. One wanted a dress that you could wear to any formal occasion, Church next Sunday, perhaps a christening, perhaps a funeral. However, the attitudes of restraint and self-denial, of using up and making do... of plain-old practicality was about to make way to a reaction to increased advertisement.
Newspapers and magazines became syndicated. Later, there would be a radio in every home. Motion pictures began exposing viewers to a lavish standard of living. Many of the big corperations that you and I are familiar with today were working hard to selling consumers (most notably women consumers, especially after the 1950s, when it became clear that women were doing most of the spending) items they may not need... but items they could be made to want.
It's no secret that after Queen Victoria Married Prince Albert in 1840, she married in white and the fashion industry went ga-ga. Every girl wanted to be married in white. But fashion is fickle, and changes with every whim and invention. In 1856, an 18-year-old chemist named William Henry Perkin patented a dye called mauvine that worked beautifully on wools and silks, giving them rich purple hues. Before this moment, all dyes were of the veggie-based variety... making them somewhat pale and prone to fading. Other bright colors soon followed: fuchia, magenta, vivid greens, kingfisher blue and even turquoise. Brides lept at the chance to wear these colors, too...because deep shades (not to mention any jewlery other than perhaps a string of pearls) were forbidden to unmarried women.
Goes to show that the Victorians were simply crazy for outlandish colors. Wedding dresses showed up in every hue, and even large-scale plaid. Who couldn't wear such a gown to their next formal affair? Better yet, wearing a deep blue brocade isn't going to simply scream "Bride!" to every dinner guest when you don it at a later date.
That was the era that the averyage woman & her family created their own wedding. In Little Women, Meg and her sisters host her wedding with home made cake. She makes her own dress. Getting married "in the church" signified that you'd have enough people there to fill a church and it became a much more grandiose occasion involving music, attendants, etc.
The book later tells me that much of the wedding format seen today was invented by the Victorian American Elite.... the Vanderbilts and Jeromes and Fields and Whitneys. The invitations, the white *satin* dress, the music, the flowers (and oh, the Victorians loved thier flowers!), the tiered wedding cake, the attendants and bridesmaid's dresses were mostly things that the elite kept to themselves. Later, the Nouveau Rche workled very carefully to copy the Elite's every move and brodcast it.
Well, as advertisement and technology worked it's way west, so did the middle class, and with them, better living conditions. Simultaniously, synthetic fabric suddenly put affordable bridal satin into the hadsof many more young brides then ever before. However, dresses changed with fashion and some were even advertised as adaptable....well into the 1940's women were wearing things they planned to wear again: White --yes, always--but also yellow and baby blue suits and sundresses.
Slowly,however, the department stores were beginning to make their mark.
With all these young girls who were ready and eager to have a "white wedding", a "church wedding", there was a sudden longing for a standard-- a tradition. Many of these women couldn't look to how their mother or grandmother was married, because many of them would be the first in their generation to *have* a big church wedding.
Macy's to the rescue.
Savvy department stores took careful notice of the Engagement announcemnts in every paper and sent a little gift package to the bride's home. A checklist of gifts to cross off once they were received (hopefully that were registered at their store), and a datebook and planner and a handy book of "Bridal Etiquette" that claimed the way things were to be done. Retailer appointed themselves the custodians of wedding traditions. And--of course-- the way that things were to be done was always the most expensive way.
The Invitations are particularly telling. Now, I live in Oregon, and people tend to be inventing and re-inventing themselves all the time here... but even one of my Oregon Brides sent me this:
Mr Thomas vanDriel and Mrs. Mary vanDriel
Request the pleasure of your company
At the marriage of their daughter
etc...
Not long ago, the obligatory inner envelope would have been included (not an option. Necessary.) and it would have been *engraved* at Tiffany's.
Why are tradittional wedding invitations so archaic in form and format? Consuelo Vanderbilt's wedding to the Duke of Marlborough in 1895 looked exactly like them. So, naturally, they were over-formalized and extremely expensive. However, when the brides were looking over desert plates and engagement rings, and asked about how the invitations ought to look, they were met with a very suave "Oh, engraved, miss. On a card. Let me show you. They've always been done this way."
And the idea sold. Brides, eager to do the right thing, leaped at the advice that was sent to them in advertisements and magazines.
The Second World War (more so than the first) shaped the following generation to seek what my History Professor Hal Swafford called "a return to Normalcy". This demand for "getting back to normal" touched everything in American lives. The liberations that women enjoyed in the 1940's (and many of the liberations that they were built on from the teens through the 2nd world war) were sequestered. There was a baby boom. There was a marriage boom. The modern idea of the consumer was really born, and advertising exploded. Leave it to Beaver was on Television.
The American wedding did not escape this return to normalcy. The wedding industry strove to standardize everything about the wedding, not just invitations. After the rations of some fibers during the war era, the industry demanded that real wedding gowns were full-skirted, using yards and yards of exquisite fabric. And it was the standard, because by god, it was a bride's patriotic duty to spend money, be happy and help prove that the country (and world) was--indeed-- returning to normal. There was something evocatiove and symbolic about a woman in a white gown... something totemic that spoke to everyone in an emotional way.
This, too, sold.
All these things have made it just that much harder for some of us who want to have a wedding that *isn't* anything like the wedding that people have been having for 50 years (with a brief exception in the 1970's, where people were wearing caftan's). And the reason it's harder is because everything and everyone that I'd like to help me (professionally speaking...all my friends and family are very helpful) is coming from this position that is everything I don't want my wedding to be.
Worse yet, because my wedding won't resemble everyone else's, I have been warned that few attendees will take it very seriously.
And the worst part of *that* is that I understand how important symbols are to people. And I know that such nay-sayers may even be *right*. Not about people who are very close... but to my aunts and friends of my mother's perhaps.
So, I've been trying to make peace with that, and have decided to throw caution to the wind. At *least* there'll be a good party and if that's the best most people take from it, then that's fine by me.
This wedding will confuse people because it won't resemble a wedding.
*there will probably be no processional.
*There is no wedding party
*It is unlikely that my dress will be white. My corset (that I'm wearing over the dress) is black with multicolored flowers
*I am not going to carry flowers. I found out it was common for Victorian brides to carry fans in the summer
*There will be no presenting of the bride & groom after the wedding...we'll just go to the table to eat
*there will be no journey from church to reception area.
*hell, there will be no church
*THERE WILL DEFINITELY BE NO ONE CORINTHIANS 13!!! God I am SICK of that reading.
*There will likely be no "first dance" or even "father-daughter dance" unless Marty actaully thinks he's going to plug an ipod in between ceremony and food. And, frankly,even then I'm not sure that would work. Actually, we're still working on the transition between ceremony and food. It's all happening in the same place, in the same chairs.
There's more.
Therewill be more, there's always more. And the book is genius. It really works it's way into tjhe 1950's mindet (which is when the "reluctant groom" cliche' came about, too) in a way that pretty much requires another rant.... and a whole lot more reaserch.
The books's good. Read it! Not just brides, not just women.... everyone.
okay, I'm starving, I'm gonna see what we're doing for dinner!
I dislike stuffiness.
I dislike pretense.
Ever since I was tiny I have balked at the idea that a woman must be married in a white gown. Why? And WHY --If she's going to spend several hunderd or even a couple thousand (!) dollars on an outfit-- does she never wear it again?
Why do those wedding invitations sound to stuffy? ("Mr. and Mrs. Bride's Parents Request the Honour of your Presence at the Marriage of their daughter..." Blah blah blah.)
So, one of the books I picked up ONLY because it has a vintage photo of how I want my hair done, ended up being brilliant.
All Dressed In White: The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding by Carol McD. Wallace is a very careful observation of American wedding customs starting just before the Victorian era and ending in the present (better put: explaining the present).
The first several chapters retell stories that I'm already aware of: that our prarie grandmothers dressed in their best for thir wedding... that may be pink or blue.... laura Ingalls Wilder's wedding dress was actually black. White dresses always showed affluence (they dirtied so easily, and every sewing error shows in white worse than in patters or even other shades), and many a girl married in white.... but from what I understand, many *more* only ever dreamed of it. One wanted a dress that you could wear to any formal occasion, Church next Sunday, perhaps a christening, perhaps a funeral. However, the attitudes of restraint and self-denial, of using up and making do... of plain-old practicality was about to make way to a reaction to increased advertisement.
Newspapers and magazines became syndicated. Later, there would be a radio in every home. Motion pictures began exposing viewers to a lavish standard of living. Many of the big corperations that you and I are familiar with today were working hard to selling consumers (most notably women consumers, especially after the 1950s, when it became clear that women were doing most of the spending) items they may not need... but items they could be made to want.
It's no secret that after Queen Victoria Married Prince Albert in 1840, she married in white and the fashion industry went ga-ga. Every girl wanted to be married in white. But fashion is fickle, and changes with every whim and invention. In 1856, an 18-year-old chemist named William Henry Perkin patented a dye called mauvine that worked beautifully on wools and silks, giving them rich purple hues. Before this moment, all dyes were of the veggie-based variety... making them somewhat pale and prone to fading. Other bright colors soon followed: fuchia, magenta, vivid greens, kingfisher blue and even turquoise. Brides lept at the chance to wear these colors, too...because deep shades (not to mention any jewlery other than perhaps a string of pearls) were forbidden to unmarried women.
Goes to show that the Victorians were simply crazy for outlandish colors. Wedding dresses showed up in every hue, and even large-scale plaid. Who couldn't wear such a gown to their next formal affair? Better yet, wearing a deep blue brocade isn't going to simply scream "Bride!" to every dinner guest when you don it at a later date.
That was the era that the averyage woman & her family created their own wedding. In Little Women, Meg and her sisters host her wedding with home made cake. She makes her own dress. Getting married "in the church" signified that you'd have enough people there to fill a church and it became a much more grandiose occasion involving music, attendants, etc.
The book later tells me that much of the wedding format seen today was invented by the Victorian American Elite.... the Vanderbilts and Jeromes and Fields and Whitneys. The invitations, the white *satin* dress, the music, the flowers (and oh, the Victorians loved thier flowers!), the tiered wedding cake, the attendants and bridesmaid's dresses were mostly things that the elite kept to themselves. Later, the Nouveau Rche workled very carefully to copy the Elite's every move and brodcast it.
Well, as advertisement and technology worked it's way west, so did the middle class, and with them, better living conditions. Simultaniously, synthetic fabric suddenly put affordable bridal satin into the hadsof many more young brides then ever before. However, dresses changed with fashion and some were even advertised as adaptable....well into the 1940's women were wearing things they planned to wear again: White --yes, always--but also yellow and baby blue suits and sundresses.
Slowly,however, the department stores were beginning to make their mark.
With all these young girls who were ready and eager to have a "white wedding", a "church wedding", there was a sudden longing for a standard-- a tradition. Many of these women couldn't look to how their mother or grandmother was married, because many of them would be the first in their generation to *have* a big church wedding.
Macy's to the rescue.
Savvy department stores took careful notice of the Engagement announcemnts in every paper and sent a little gift package to the bride's home. A checklist of gifts to cross off once they were received (hopefully that were registered at their store), and a datebook and planner and a handy book of "Bridal Etiquette" that claimed the way things were to be done. Retailer appointed themselves the custodians of wedding traditions. And--of course-- the way that things were to be done was always the most expensive way.
The Invitations are particularly telling. Now, I live in Oregon, and people tend to be inventing and re-inventing themselves all the time here... but even one of my Oregon Brides sent me this:
Mr Thomas vanDriel and Mrs. Mary vanDriel
Request the pleasure of your company
At the marriage of their daughter
etc...
Not long ago, the obligatory inner envelope would have been included (not an option. Necessary.) and it would have been *engraved* at Tiffany's.
Why are tradittional wedding invitations so archaic in form and format? Consuelo Vanderbilt's wedding to the Duke of Marlborough in 1895 looked exactly like them. So, naturally, they were over-formalized and extremely expensive. However, when the brides were looking over desert plates and engagement rings, and asked about how the invitations ought to look, they were met with a very suave "Oh, engraved, miss. On a card. Let me show you. They've always been done this way."
And the idea sold. Brides, eager to do the right thing, leaped at the advice that was sent to them in advertisements and magazines.
The Second World War (more so than the first) shaped the following generation to seek what my History Professor Hal Swafford called "a return to Normalcy". This demand for "getting back to normal" touched everything in American lives. The liberations that women enjoyed in the 1940's (and many of the liberations that they were built on from the teens through the 2nd world war) were sequestered. There was a baby boom. There was a marriage boom. The modern idea of the consumer was really born, and advertising exploded. Leave it to Beaver was on Television.
The American wedding did not escape this return to normalcy. The wedding industry strove to standardize everything about the wedding, not just invitations. After the rations of some fibers during the war era, the industry demanded that real wedding gowns were full-skirted, using yards and yards of exquisite fabric. And it was the standard, because by god, it was a bride's patriotic duty to spend money, be happy and help prove that the country (and world) was--indeed-- returning to normal. There was something evocatiove and symbolic about a woman in a white gown... something totemic that spoke to everyone in an emotional way.
This, too, sold.
All these things have made it just that much harder for some of us who want to have a wedding that *isn't* anything like the wedding that people have been having for 50 years (with a brief exception in the 1970's, where people were wearing caftan's). And the reason it's harder is because everything and everyone that I'd like to help me (professionally speaking...all my friends and family are very helpful) is coming from this position that is everything I don't want my wedding to be.
Worse yet, because my wedding won't resemble everyone else's, I have been warned that few attendees will take it very seriously.
And the worst part of *that* is that I understand how important symbols are to people. And I know that such nay-sayers may even be *right*. Not about people who are very close... but to my aunts and friends of my mother's perhaps.
So, I've been trying to make peace with that, and have decided to throw caution to the wind. At *least* there'll be a good party and if that's the best most people take from it, then that's fine by me.
This wedding will confuse people because it won't resemble a wedding.
*there will probably be no processional.
*There is no wedding party
*It is unlikely that my dress will be white. My corset (that I'm wearing over the dress) is black with multicolored flowers
*I am not going to carry flowers. I found out it was common for Victorian brides to carry fans in the summer
*There will be no presenting of the bride & groom after the wedding...we'll just go to the table to eat
*there will be no journey from church to reception area.
*hell, there will be no church
*THERE WILL DEFINITELY BE NO ONE CORINTHIANS 13!!! God I am SICK of that reading.
*There will likely be no "first dance" or even "father-daughter dance" unless Marty actaully thinks he's going to plug an ipod in between ceremony and food. And, frankly,even then I'm not sure that would work. Actually, we're still working on the transition between ceremony and food. It's all happening in the same place, in the same chairs.
There's more.
Therewill be more, there's always more. And the book is genius. It really works it's way into tjhe 1950's mindet (which is when the "reluctant groom" cliche' came about, too) in a way that pretty much requires another rant.... and a whole lot more reaserch.
The books's good. Read it! Not just brides, not just women.... everyone.
okay, I'm starving, I'm gonna see what we're doing for dinner!