This is the thing.
When you make the bold, whereas different choice, it gets all the attention, the flak. I appreciate that this article is making an doing best in order to, and I hope that we will all continue to try to find a way to make it easier for you to wear your nonwhite dress, and for all of us to make the choices that are right for us, cultural expectations be damned, I don’t know how exactly ladies can show solidarity to each other despite being on different ends of this phenomenon. Unless you specifically say that you are rejecting the patriarchal implications, you kind of get away with pleasing everyone in their own mindset.
It stung reading this article.
It was a very long time after Victoria’s wedding before white became the dominant color. Even PLAID! The association with virginity isn’twas not really very old. I’m pretty certain that it’s a ‘non issue’ day except with some ultraconservative types. It is almost white was rare in Victoria’s time because of upkeep expense for the color. As a result, can you send your feminists over to talk to my colleagues and relatives? Consequently, it only happened once white dresses became the default. Most brides wearing almost white are not virgins and haven’t been for a bit of a long time. Historically, women wore their best dress to their wedding. Women used to wear any color, even grey! Laundry was a bigger ordeal.
This post includes one or more of our sponsors, who are a key part of supporting APW. Part of me worried that by wearing an almost white gown, I’d be buying into patriarchal symbolism, when it comes down to it. Check out the Directory page for Betty Clicker Photography.
It was my mom who, for many years, had stressed whitish, My dad couldn’t have given a flying crap what color I wore down the aisle. We found this dress months before actually going dress shopping and both fell in love with it, and she decided whitish wasn’t so important. Nobody has ever said it didn’t look weddingy and actually, almost five years later, people still rave about the dress and say it was the thing that really made the wedding look. This is the case. Take that, PW’s annoying relatives.
However, I’ve decided I don’t have to wear a non whitish wedding dress to look like a feminist, just after much reflection.
This is also so true. Consequently, not an inherently feminist choice, just one based on my own personal preferences. I want to ask you a question. Because patriarchy decided to ‘co opt’ the look a freaking queen wore on her wedding day, why should feminists be limited to only wearing certain colors? It’s time to reclaim white. I decided I’d rather spend the money on fancy gold earrings.
This comment reminds me that I had a minor freakout after watching Downton wedding episode Abbey with Mrs. WAIT WHAT IS A WEDDING ANYWAY because watching that historical wedding just threw me for a loop. Hughes and Mr. Now pay attention please. Indian heritage and it is the tradition to wear light red on your wedding day in India. You can find more info about it on this site. Carson and she wore a BROWN dress that everyone made fun of but they still looked beautiful and were in love. It’s a well plenty of dress shops can custom make or dye the dresses in different colors, so you usually don’t have to buy the ivory whitish dress version that is the default.
Nobody said anything negative to me and if they were thinking it.
It probably helped that after we semi eloped, by comparison not wearing whitish hardly merited a place on my list of societal scandals. Essentially, rock your fabulous nonwhite wedding dress!
Lovely next to my husband’s teal shirt. My mom actually wore a short white lace dress. Not one single person got confused about who was getting married. This is where it starts getting very intriguing. When I was a kid I learned that Laura Ingalls Wilder got married in a grey dress. Role models FTW, whether fictional or real. My little kid mind was blown and decades later, that made it easier not to wear white when I got married. Besides, you know what?
In search of answers about exactly how ‘antifeminist’ it is to wear almost white to your wedding, I began doing what any selfrespecting academic would do. That’s not the reason Victoria chose it, while white is a color that has historically symbolized purity and virginity. It is when Queen Victoria wore the hue to her nuptials, the white wedding gown actually became popular in 1840. You see, wedding history dresses is ironic. What I discovered is wearing custom white to one’s wedding didn’t start out as a manifestation of sartorial sexism. Plenty of info can be found easily by going on the web. The truth is, she had some prized white lace she wanted to show off on the big day. Now please pay attention. Saturday nights. So a style of wedding dress that has subsequently become a symbol of patriarchal oppression was popularized by the most powerful woman of her era. That said, Victoria got what she wanted, because she was the goddamn queen.
I found wedding dress shopping a surprisingly ‘bodypositive’ and empowering experience, as I havealready written about.
a few weeks later, when staring idly at a picture of my wedding dress on my phone, it finally hit me. FLOTUS inspired arms muscles and looking anythingbutvirginal. Now let me tell you something. My feminist sensibilities were offended by oldfashioned wedding dresses like that, weren’t they? My dress is bridal cream but kind of witchy and sexy too. White like the conservative wedding gowns they make Barbie dolls and princesses of small European countries wear.
Despite its pretty non sexist origin story, the whitish wedding dress was subsequently co opted by a patriarchal society that decided to use almost white gowns as a symbol of women’s sexual purity.
It’s not any old color like greenish or purple. The implication is the right to wear the color white is something women are meant to earn. You have to work for the privilege to wear it by keeping your legs shut the way your male elders want you to. Now pay attention please. It’s also why comedians make jokes about reality stars who’ve been married four times wearing almost white to their fifth weddings. That’s why they’re customary in church weddings.
There are a few meanings behind breaking the glass, as with any old tradition.
In this reading the glass represents both the idea that you were born half a soul and are reconnecting with your other half and that some day the temple should be rebuilt and Jerusalem going to be reunited as well. The most prominent is to commemorate the 2nd destruction temple in Jerusalem.
The call for the temple to be rebuilt is historically Zionist. You should take it into account. While other explanations have come up over the years that are less religious but this one remains very much at that center tradition and it ain’t necessary something I wish to include in my process of getting married.
Instead, I thought I’d pick a blue gown like Blair Waldorf when she married Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl, the greatest television show of our time. My mom ok me to Kleinfeld’s and everything changed. Sarah Sahagian is a feminist writer and academic living in Toronto. You should take this seriously. Her ‘feminist friendly’ young adult novel, Good Girls, should be released by Inanna Press this fall. Her work has appeared in such publications as She Does The City, xoJane, The Beaverton, and The Huffington Post.
One of my biggest pet peeves is hearing people talk about women who have earned the right to wear white for their weddings.
It became a ‘tradition’ much later. That is what I also heard about Queen Victoria’s wedding dress and cake. Anyway, haven’t we all earned that right by being humans? They where white because it was a sign of great wealth and the showed the ability to keep her prized lace actually almost white. The same goes for the cake being whitish because they had to used expensive refined sugar and flours to make it actually be a true white. It would have been a rarity and sign of affluence at the time.