The tailor’s invoice was terse. On April 4, 1766, Johann Adam Ströver submitted his bill for a dress he described simply as a ‘court gown made of silver fabric’. The gown was old-fashioned in silhouette, with its whale-boned bodice and enormous panniers, but its impact was dazzling, a glittering confection of heavy French silk embroidered with garlands of silver and white foliage and flowers. It was sumptuously ornamented with bands, swags, tassels and ciphers made from silver thread, silver braid and even solid silver, afterwards removed and melted down. One Swedish newspaper, Stockholms Post Tidningar, described it matter of factly as ‘a rather precious dress’.
Indeed it was, for Ströver’s gown was worn by Princess Sophia Magdalena of Denmark, a granddaughter of Britain’s George II, for her wedding to Crown Prince Gustav of Sweden, to whom she had been engaged since her fifth birthday. Today, the dress survives in Sweden’s Royal Armoury.
The 1816 wedding dress of Princess Charlotte of Wales, created by London dressmaker Mrs Triaud.
Princess Sophia’s gown reminds us that wedding clothes were not only white. Indeed, silver dresses were particularly favoured by Europe’s royal brides. For her marriage in 1816 to Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Princess Charlotte of Wales, only daughter of George IV, wore a dress created by London dressmaker Mrs Triaud that featured layers of net stitched with bands of silver thread, known as ‘lama’. The high-waisted gown with its train and apron was a symphony of silver, ‘of silver lama on net, over a silver tissue slip, embroidered at the bottom with silver lama in shells and flowers’.
It was an unusual choice for the Princess, according to the Royal Collection Trust, who preferred simple styles. As in Georgian royal tradition, the wedding was held at 9pm, in the Crimson Drawing Room at Carlton House. By candlelight, the highly textured, metal thread-sewn gown sparkled.
Gowns like those worn by the Princesses were too costly for ordinary brides. The silk-embroidered, gold- and silver-buttoned wedding dress made for Edward I’s youngest daughter Elizabeth in 1297 was sewn by a team of 35 tailors paid 70 shillings, a year’s wages for a skilled craftsman. Instead, many would wear dresses after more general fashions of women’s clothes. William Hogarth’s The Wedding of Stephen Beckingham and Mary Cox, 1729, depicts the couple’s marriage ceremony that summer in the London church of St Benet, Paul’s Wharf.
The bride wears a fashionable robe a l’anglaise. It may be white, silver or grey and its bodice is decorated with vertical bands of gold embroidery. Save for the decorative details and heavy silks, indicated by Hogarth’s shimmering highlights, nothing differentiates Cox’s wedding dress from the gowns of the three women with her.
The dress worn by Sarah Maria Wright when she married Lincolnshire farm labourer Daniel Neal in 1841 — now in the V&A Museum — exactly resembles styles that were then ‘in fashion’ outside of London. It had a low neckline, full sleeves with gathered shoulders and a wide skirt. Made of cotton, it had a blockprint pattern of pink, red and blue (a ‘copy’ of more expensive designs), providing the new Mrs Neal with a practical, but smart frock to be worn often after her big day.
It typifies the habit — widespread among women of non-elite backgrounds — of women getting married in their best clothes, regardless of colour, with red, pink, blue and even black widespread. If white was chosen it was, in part, for practicality, as garments could be dyed easily or adapted with coloured accessories. The emergence of wedding-dress fashion distinct from mainstream women’s style is a 20th-century phenomenon, when a bride who might typically wear jeans appears in a dress closer to those worn by her Victorian antecedents.
'The Wedding of Stephen Beckingham and Mary Cox' by Hogarth. Save for the decorative details and heavy silks, indicated by Hogarth’s shimmering highlights, nothing differentiates Cox’s wedding dress from the gowns of the three women with her.
The catalyst for widespread change was Queen Victoria’s decision in 1840 to wear ‘a white satin dress with a very deep flounce of Honiton lace, imitation of old’ for her marriage to Prince Albert. It was made by her dressmaker Mary Bettans and shaped by the Queen’s desire to boost two failing concerns: Devon lace-making and Spitalfields silk-weaving.
Victoria’s decision to be married in daytime, so that more people could see the wedding procession, may also have guided her choice away from a silver gown seen to best advantage in candlelight. She opted for white for her going-away ensemble, too: ‘a white silk gown, trimmed with swan’s down, & a bonnet with orange flowers’. Later, the Queen insisted all five of her daughters used Honiton lace in their wedding dresses. In 1871, the artistic Princess Louise designed her own Honiton lace veil.
Where the Queen led, others followed and white or near-white wedding gowns — seen in her time as a symbol of innocence and sexual purity — quickly supplanted other choices, as they have continued to do.