White wedding

A white wedding is a traditional formal or semi-formal wedding originating in Britain.

The term originates from the white colour of the wedding dress, which first became popular with Victorian era elites after Queen Victoria wore a white lace dress at her wedding. However, the term now also encapsulates the entire Western wedding routine, especially in the Christian religious tradition, which generally includes a ceremony during which the marriage begins, followed by a reception.

The tradition of a white wedding dress is commonly credited to Queen Victoria's choice to wear a white court dress at her wedding to Prince Albert in 1840. Debutantes had long been required to wear white court dresses for their first presentation at court, at a "Drawing Room" where they were introduced to the queen for the first time.

Royal brides before Victoria did not typically wear white, instead choosing "heavy brocaded gowns embroidered with white and silver thread," with red being a particularly popular colour in Western Europe more generally. European and American brides had been wearing a plethora of colours, including blue, yellow, and practical colours like black, brown, or gray. As accounts of Victoria's wedding spread across the Atlantic and throughout Europe, elites followed her lead.

Worldwide, the color white has been associated with weddings and other significant life or spiritual events for millennia. In ancient Greece, white was the color of bridal joy, and brides not only wore white dresses and white flowers, but they also painted their bodies white. In China, it was the color of purity and perfection, and thus uniquely suitable as a color associated with death, which they saw as the time when the deceased person moved towards ultimate perfection. In ancient Japan, white was also the color of purity and innocence. In Africa, the color white is associated with deities and worship. In the Christian tradition, white clothes were worn at the time of baptism to represent spiritual purity and the washing away of sins.

Because of the limitations of laundering techniques before the later part of the 20th century, white dresses provided an opportunity for conspicuous consumption. They were favored primarily as a way to show the world that the bride's family was so wealthy and so firmly part of the leisure class that the bride would choose an elaborate dress that could be ruined by any sort of work or spill.

...
Wikipedia