The wedding dress: 300 years of bridal fashions

Abstract

This fully updated and revised editon is published in both paperback and hardback to accompany a major V & A exhibition. The Wedding Dress draws on wedding garments in the V & A's collection, photographs, letters, memoirs, newspaper accounts and genealogical research to explore the history of the wedding dress and the traditions that have developed around it since 1700. It focuses on the white wedding dress, which became fashionable in the early nineteenth century and is now chosen by women across the world ... The sumptuous book considers the way couturiers and designers have challenged and refreshed the traditional white dress and the influence of the wedding industry, whose antecedents lie in the commercialization of the wedding in Victorian Britain. The Wedding Dress is not only about costume, but also about the cultivation of the image of the bride. This book is a glorious tribute to an exquisite, stylish, glamorous gown, the romance of its evolution and the splendour of its design.

Contents

Silver and white, 1700-90 -- The white wedding dress, 1790-1840 : a working-class wedding -- Commercializing the white wedding, 1840-1914 : too old for white -- Towards the modern, 1914-45 : to wed in red -- Ready-to-wear, 1945-90 : a civil wedding -- Choosing white, 1990s to the present.