4 Major Wedding Traditions: Explained!
From wearing a wedding veil and a white wedding gown to asking your best friends to be your bridesmaids and tossing your garter, your wedding day is steeped in tradition. But sometimes the origins of those traditions are absolutely bananas (demons! witches! unruly wedding guests!). Check out a few of our favorites—and never look at a wedding ceremony the same way again!
You’ll feel as pretty as Queen Victoria in one of these White by Vera Wang wedding dresses.
Tradition: Wearing a White Wedding Dress
Modern brides might describe their wedding dress as “cream” or “ivory,” but in most cases, it’s some variation on white. While colorful wedding gowns—blush, pink, ombre, and even black—have definitely been called out as an emerging trend, traditional brides have stayed true to the color white ever since Queen Victoria wed Prince Albert in 1840. Before that, according to Hanne Blank, author of Virgin, the Untouched History, most brides wore whatever was nicest piece of clothing in their closet, while nobility wore luxurious gowns embroidered with metallic thread. Victoria ditched the nobility’s traditional silver gown for a white satin one and “unintentionally kick-started the tradition of the white wedding dress: How better to feel like a queen […] on one’s wedding day, than to dress like one?”
Tradition: Having Bridesmaids
While they’re invaluable for moral support, throwing awesome bachelorette parties, and helping you get in and out of your dress, bridesmaids used to have a far more serious role in the wedding: protecting the bride from evil spirits. Bridesmaids were originally directed to dress just like the bride, and this, says Blank, was “intended to confuse evil spirits or those who wished to harm the bride.” (No matter how much you love them, or how many demons they saved you from, could you imagine taking your bridesmaids along on your very private, very intimate honeymoon? Nineteenth-century couples did just that, according to historian Ginger Strand, taking along their whole wedding party on a “bridal tour”!).
Tradition: Donning a Wedding Veil
Similarly, wedding veils were supposed to help guard the bride against demons and witches—if they couldn’t see her, they couldn’t curse her.
Tradition: Tossing the Garter
If the idea of showing some leg in front of your extended family is embarrassing, think about how tough brides from from more conservative times had it. In Marriage Customs of the World, George Monger explains how “bridal garters were prized as love tokens with magical properties,” and because of this, male wedding guests would try to pull them off and then pin to their hats for good luck. For good luck! In Wedding Customs Then and Now, published in 1919, Carl Holliday advises women to “fasten it loosely to the bottom of her dress [or] find her clothes in rags after the struggle.” Somehow, having your husband take it off doesn’t seem so bad anymore!
—Written by Caitlin Van Horn for Brides
Some of these traditions are so unexpected! Which tradition’s history did you find the most interesting?
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