A wedding dress or bridal gown is the dress worn by the bride during a wedding ceremony.
In Western culture, the wedding dress is most commonly white, a tradition popularised by elites in the Victorian era after Queen Victoria wore a white dress at her wedding to Prince Albert.
In Eastern cultures, such as Chinese and Indian cultures, brides will often wear red to their weddings to symbolize auspiciousness.
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History
Western culture
Historically, weddings have often symbolised a strategic union between families, businesses, kingdoms, or nations. Brides were expected to dress according to their status, with women from wealthy families donning rich colours and exclusive fabrics, such as furs, velvet, and silk. Brides from lower social strata wore their best church dress on their wedding day.
The first documented instance of a royal bride wearing a white wedding dress was that of Philippa of England. She wore a tunic with a cloak in white silk bordered with squirrel and ermine in 1406, when she married Eric of Pomerania.
Similarly, Mary, Queen of Scots, wore a white wedding dress in 1559 when she married her first husband, Francis, the Dauphin of France.
This was not a widespread trend, however: prior to the Victorian era, a bride was married in any color, black being popular in Finland.
The white wedding dress gained popularity after the Queen Victoria's wedding in 1840 to Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, when Victoria wore a white gown trimmed with Honiton lace. Illustrations of the wedding were widely published, and many elite Victorian brides donned white dresses at their weddings.
In the early 1900s, clothing included a lot of decorations, such as lace or frills. This was also adopted in wedding dresses, where decorative frills and lace were common. For example, in the 1920s, they were typically short in the front with a longer train in the back and were worn with cloche-style wedding veils. This tendency to follow current fashions continued until the late 1960s, when it became popular to revert to long, full-skirted designs reminiscent of the Victorian era.
Since the mid-20th century, white has been the dominant color for Western wedding dresses, though "wedding white" includes shades such as eggshell, ecru, and ivory.
Eastern culture
Traditionally, a Kurdish first-time bride would wear a red dress for her wedding to symbolize the postcoital bleeding she will experience when she loses her virginity while a Kurdish bride who used to be married before would wear pink. Many Kurds associate red wedding dresses with impoverished Kurdish rural society and it is no longer commonly worn.
In India, brides wear a wedding sari. These are usually red with golden brocade, as red is the color associated with married women. Other colors appear in some regions and castes, like red-white checkering in Tamil Nadu.