Wearing white at the wedding is a relatively recent practice . The marriages of the Middle Ages were contracts for the exchange or transfer of property. In the ceremony, the brides wore a more or less showy dress but of any color –green, red, blue–, as shown in paintings of the time.
Later, in the painting of the wedding dance of the Duc de Joyeuse with Margaret of Lorraine-Vaudémont (1580), the couple is seen in clothes that do not differ from those of the invited courtiers.
In 1660, the Infanta María Teresa of Spain wore black! on the day of her union with Louis XIV of France, and Catherine the Great of Russia was married dressed in the eighteenth-century fashion, in silver.
The irruption of white occurred in England in the 19th century . Princess Charlotte, Queen Victoria’s cousin, wore that color during her betrothal in 1816; the costume is kept in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
But it was in 1840, at the queen’s own wedding to her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, that the tradition gained real strength. In part it was due to the growing mass of print media and the emerging photography, which contributed to the fact that the portraits and the news of Victoria’s wedding, which was dressed in radiant white, were known by millions of people.
However, it took the 20th century for this bridal color to become a popular fashion and reach all social classes in most countries . Today wedding white includes pastel shades such as egg, ecru, and ivory. The dress of that color wanted to signify the purity and innocence of childhood and, therefore, of virginity, although currently it has lost that meaning in the vast majority of cases.
