Girls in White Dresses
Here’s an idea for all you boundary-transgressing, iconoclastic young women out there, if there are any of you left this far into the century’s turn: wear a wedding gown around for the day. There are always a few frothy white dresses in the thrift shops. They’re a bit more expensive than the housewife shifts you usually buy, but don’t you think the Hollywood-fuelled vintage clothing craze has spoiled the appeal of mid-century clothing? Instead, dress up as a bride for the day. Talk to your bank teller, bus driver, and dry cleaner about the patriarchy, marriage, and lipstick feminism. You might need to do this before you’re actually engaged, however. Once you’ve decided to get married, the dress will have you under its spell.
Wedding season is long over now, which gives us a little quiet time to reflect. Why is it that in a culture that takes superficial pleasure in sacrilege, the bride remains largely untouched? Television broadcasts of spoiled Bridezillas only emphasize the point: these selfish women do not deserve to be brides. Nor is contemporary feminism an amulet against the power of the dress: Gloria Steinem may have married in ordinary clothing, but third-wave feminism has always treated the feminine as a role that comes with a fun costume, which means that the white wedding dress is OK.
Steinem’s choice of dress is a reflection of an older stage of feminism (fish without bicycles), good taste (the long white gown looks best on a woman who can still pass herself off as an innocent), and generation. In the late sixties and seventies, weddings were the perfect occasion to shock the squares and mock the institution of marriage at the same time. Brides chose cotton Mexican wedding dresses, dashikis, and in extreme cases, nudity. Often they just went with very short skirts. (The best example I know of a short-skirted bride was a family friend married in 1970, who wore not only a very, very short white dress, but black over-the-knee boots.) The cultural shift back to a more bourgeois sensibility left its mark on weddings, too. Since the 1980s, we have believed that weddings are supposed to look like – well, weddings. Prince Charles and Diana Spencer set the standard for the lavish wedding, and a quarter of a century later, weddings are still variations on the basic elements of that ill-fated occasion. Vintage cars, probably, instead of a horse and carriage, and perhaps a more manageable train on that floor-length gown.
In my own circle, the overwhelming majority of brides have elected a standard wedding. (I didn’t, and I’ve been puzzling over the appeal of the contemporary wedding ever since.) It has its roots in the Victorian age, but became widely practiced only in the postwar era. And from the 1980s on, the requirements have steadily proliferated and become more expensive. It is so entrenched as a rite of passage that many lesbians, who want the legal protection and societal sanction of marriage, also want a big white wedding. It’s possible that social conservatives, who have argued for civil unions with protections identical to marriage, are less offended by the idea of two women promising to stay together than they are by the burlesque of a pair of brides. If it were my gay wedding, I’d be checking out decidedly unweddingy things from Philippe Dubuc or Marie St. Pierre. Maybe Armani. Hey, you’re only doing this once, right?
The dress, having performed its role in the weddng, remains a sacred object. Dry cleaners will clean and pack the dress to archival standards. It will go in a box with a little cellophane window, so that you can visit it without exposing it to the vicissitudes of the oxygen in your bedroom. How symbolically unpleasant it would be to watch that whiter-than-white turn sepia and ochre! The only other artefact in contemporary life to receive this museum-quality veneration are the wedding photographs.
The big wedding has attracted the (mostly negative) attention of cultural observers over the years, but they haven’t paid much attention to the photographs. Odd, since photography is one of the most expensive line items in suggested wedding budgets (about 10 per cent of the total), and a wedding ranks as the only occasion when normal people hire a professional to photograph a family event. As Lili Corbus Bezner points out in one of the rare scholarly treatments of wedding photography, the photos progress from shots of the bride alone, often with her unconscious reflection in a mirror, through the wedding itself, and finally to the public reception. Brides are liminal creatures, undergoing the transformation from maiden to wife, and the photos attempt to capture that. “Despite social change,” Bezner writes, “most engaged couples still demand the creation of a visual ideal for their wedding day.” The recent rise of the photojournalistic style - candid black-and-white shots - ensures that we continue to take this ideal seriously.
This imagery shows why we want weddings to look like weddings, and why the dress only increases in appeal. (Many couples write their own vows, but the imagery of the wedding is largely unquestioned. So much for theories of logocentrism.) Weddings mark a profound intersection of the public and the private, and the gown signifies a public event in a way that another dress would not. This is why brides used to change their clothes before leaving the reception - they didn’t want strangers to know they were newly married, to wink indulgently or leer at what everyone knew came next. The contemporary bride has nothing to fear from this invasion of her privacy. The vows are the climactic moment in her wedding, when she makes a very personal promise in public. But she might just wear the dress as she leaves the reception. Why not try to make the magic last as long as she can?
Ideally, this magic will remain constrained by the boundaries of good taste. Weddings, after all, are a chance to display your taste to a crowd. The off-Broadway production Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding or the hit movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) show what happens when when working-class ethnics get their hands on a wedding. It might be entertaining, but it cannot set an aesthetic standard. Far better to examine the weddings that punctuated the storylines of the lily-white sitcom Friends. Ross’s wedding to Emily in season four hits a serious snag when it turns out that the chapel is already half-demolished, but the ruin of the building becomes a romantic and picturesque contrast to the sumptuous bridal gown. Viewers knew the marriage was doomed, but the wedding sure was pretty. Phoebe and Mike’s wedding was in danger of being cancelled due to snow, but instead she pulls on a beautifully embellished coat that she had the foresight to buy along with the dress, and marries her man in a snow-covered street. Like the photojournalistic style of wedding photography, these weddings share an aesthetic of the real and the authentic. The streetscape grounds the bride’s loveliness. She may look like a fairy princess, but she intends to live in this world.
Ultimately, this may be why the wedding gown remains so popular in an era in which couples feel comfortable writing their own vows: images matter more to us than words. We demand that it look like a wedding in order to be a real wedding.