Pretty Julia, who was once the girl next door, is now a bride--radiant, delicate, dressed in pristine white with a snowy veil. In the minds of millions of people in nearly every corner of the modern world, that is the image of a marriage. Has it always been this way? Just how traditional is the glorious white wedding dress? Not very.
Custom-made white wedding dresses with all their frills are a Victorian conceit--albeit Queen Victoria herself wore a yellow silk and lace dress with matching yellow shoes. Sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century the elements of what we consider to be a traditional wedding dress came together. But even this nouveau classique is no more permanent than a castle in the sand--the whims of fashions are lapping at its edges.
Roman Romance
For the Roman bride, a wedding dress was usually a simple tube-like woolen or flax garment tied with a large woven sash. Flame yellow; a color sacred to Hymen, the god of marriage, was considered the most propitious color for her dress. Yellow shoes on her feet and a saffron veil covering her face and head completed the ensemble. The dress itself actually took second place to her many special wedding accessories. To demonstrate the wealth of the bride's family, she was loaded with hair decorations, jewelry, necklaces, and arm bands. Her coiffure was also of utmost importance: Six intertwined braids were wound about her head.
As a symbol of fertility, the Roman bride carried a small quantity of wheat. In France today, wedding guests till shower the bride and groom with wheat. (Rice is used in the United States. In Morocco, the wedding couple is pelted with raisins, figs, and dates.)
The kiss which highlights our modern wedding ceremonies is another heritage from the Roman Empire, where the betrothal ceremony consisted of the exchange of rings and a kiss--the kiss being the actual legal bond.
Nile Weddings
In ancient Egypt, everyday garments were usually the natural white of flax--perhaps because flax takes dye poorly, or because the color was considered sacred by the Egyptians. For a wedding, white robes were decorated with tints of blue, rust, and green extracted from herbal dyes.
As the millennia of Egyptian history rolled by, the simple short-sleeved style of wedding dress changed very little, with one exception. During Egypt's golden age, 1546-1319 B.C., a new style appeared, reflecting a new form of everyday dress: a robe of sheerest linen, starched with gums and pressed into accordion pleats, came into fashion. Beneath this dress, as beneath its simpler predecessor, the bride wore nothing at all.
While white was the rule for common folks, Egypt's nobility favored wedding garments colored yellow--the color of gold, and the color of the skins of the gods, according to Egyptian beliefs. The whims of Egyptian royalty also dictated where we wear our wedding rings today--on the third finger of the left hand--because the pharaohs of Egypt believed a vein, the vena amoris, ran from that finger directly to the
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