Wedding Dresses Through Time

I keep coming back to the dress. Frankly, it's the only thing I can really look at right now until some other things in our lives are settled. And it's fun. Fun it good.

So, I thought I'd look into what women wore to their weddings in historical periods.

 The first two dresses are Elizabethan, so late 1500s-early 1600s, give or take.

I love the detail of the dress on the right, but you can see where some modern wedding dress designers took inspiration in the split overskirt.

 The picture on the left is a wedding party in the 1600s, in Strassbourg, Germany. No white there, either, but you can see the real divergence in style between England and Germany.

And with the bride on the right, also from the 1600s, you can see the glorious fabrics used in her dress. The overdress looks to be velvet and quite luxurious.

 These two dresses are from the late 1700s. The panier on the dress to the right, from 1774, would have made it necessary for the bride to go through the church doors sideways!!

But the fabrics are gorgeous. I love the use of brocades and textures in these.

By the early 1800s, the Empire waist was in vogue. The dress on the left, from the Georgian period is a great example. Again, you can see inspiration for wedding dress designers today in this dress.

But the dress worn by Queen Victoria when she married her beloved Prince Albert in 1840 is when the white wedding dress craze began. At least for the rich. Not everyone wore them at that point, but it was the beginning. The middle classes and the poor wore darker colours that would be wearable and servicable for years.

I'm going to stop this post here. I have about 55,000 other photos to share, but I fear they will clog your servers!! Suffice to say, not one of these dresses inspires me. I really am looking for something more simple, but what fun to look at!

Happy Thanksgiving to my friends here in Canada. I hope you have a wonderful long weekend. I rather doubt I'll be posting until next Tuesday, as I'll be out of internet range with my family for the weekend. Luckily, I'm not getting married for a while yet, so I can eat all the turkey I want!