Today the traditional bride wears white but how was it in Regency times? Did women wear white back then and if they didn't what did they wear? When was the white wedding dress introduced? Are there any Regency wedding gowns surviving till today?
Although dresses became more elaborate later in the period white continued to be a favored color throughout the era. To the right is a French evening dress from 1804-05 d of fine white cotton embroidered in satin stitch and knots that could well have doubled as a wedding gown. A white chemise, and for the modest, an underdress as well, would be worn under this semi transparent "mull."
Queen Victoria's Influence
Queen Victoria is often credited with inventing the fashion for white wedding dresses. Although it's true that she herself wore a white dress she was by no means the first one. Anne of Brittany is supposed to have married Louis XII of France in a white dress. That was way back in 1499 e, more than three centuries before Victoria. Rather, Victoria started the fashion for white as the only acceptable color for fashionable wedding dresses. Before her the bride of royal birth often wore silver or other costly materials.
When Princess Caroline of Brunswick married The Prince of Wales on April 8, 1795, she was dressed in an extremely rich and heavy dress of silver tissue and lace, topped by a robe of ermine-lined velvet f. Her daughter Princess Charlotte, whom married Prince Leopold in 1816, had more expensive dresses than she knew what to do with. For her wedding she chose to wear a silver lamé dress over white silk, trimmed with silver lace g.
The wedding of George [IV] Prince of Wales
and Princess Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of
Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel on April 8, 1795 5
Princess Charlotte of Wales and Prince Leopold of
Cobourg returning from the Altar, after the Marriage
Ceremony on May 2 1816 6
"White Is The Most Fitting Hue"
How common the white wedding dress was is hard to say today as records are scanty, but we have some reasons to suspect that the white wedding gown was perhaps more prevalent than we may think. The Godey’s Lady’s Book h of 1849, for instance, claims that:
It is an emblem of the purity and innocence of girlhood, and the unsullied heart she now yields to the chosen one."
"Pamela is married" from the novel
"Pamela" by Richardson (1740) 7
More than a century before Victoria's wedding made white The color of wedding gowns, in 1729 to be exact, Hogarth painted 'The Wedding of Stephen Beckingham and Mary Cox i, showing the bride in a heavy white satin gown trimmed with lace and on her head a short lace weil pinned back. And, although it's a fictional wedding, painter Joseph Highmore, when he ca. 1743 illustrated the marriage scene in Samuel Richardson's "Pamela," j depicted the bride in a white silk gown, white long gloves, white fishue tucked in (Pamela is ever modest!) and her head covered with a white lace cap.
Moving forward to the Regency era, there are certainly other historical instances of the bride wearing white. When Jerome Bonaparte (Napoleon's brother) wed the fashionable American beauty Elizabeth Patterson many years later, on Christmas Eve 1803, the bride married in a dress of thin white muslin and lace k. And when Napoleon himself remarried in 1810, his bride, Marie Louise of Austria, wore a typical white muslin Regency column dress for her official church wedding l. (She and Napoleon were wed by proxy before she left Austria.) Her dress was of white satin, heavily embroidered with leaves and Napoleonic bees in silver and gold, as befitted an Empress, but the fabric of her gown and petticoat was so thin that one guest wrote that "all the clothes worn by the bride might have been put in my pocket." m
Another bride wearing white at her wedding was Jane Austen's niece Anna who married Benjamin Lefroy on November 8, 1814. Her sister Caroline describes her finery as "a dress of fine white muslin, and over it a soft silk shawl, white shot with primrose [yellow], with embossed white-satin flowers, and very handsome fringe, and on her head a small cap to match, trimmed with lace." n No veil for Anna!
Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte 9
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