The History of Weddings: Colors, Traditions and Superstitions

In ancient times, the color of the wedding dress was seen as a popular source of luck. Before modern medicine, it was not easy to achieve a long and healthy life, so people tried to have good luck with this superstition. Many superstitions arose about marriage , about a girl's fertility and her happiness in her new home.

White or a variant of white was always the favourite, symbolizing the girl's innocence and her soon-to-be-changing status. However, it was not a color used for many purposes and was not always a favorite choice. The blue associated with the Virgin Mary was another symbol of purity and traditionally symbolized fidelity and eternal love (as a result, the popularity of sapphires in engagement rings can be understood).

Brides who wore blue believed that their husbands would always be faithful to them, and they always wore something blue in relation to their wives, even if their dress itself was not blue. This is another tradition that has survived to the present day.

Pink, another popular color, was seen as the most suitable color for a May wedding . Most make skin tone look better and relate to girlhood, but some superstitions associate it with misfortune – “You're out of luck if you marry wearing pink!” The crimson hue was definitely a Victorian taboo because it was associated with wanton women.

One of the unpopular hues was green. This was seen as the color of fairies and was thought to bring bad luck to attract the attention of this little public during the transition. It was also possible that the rain would ruin the important day, as it was associated with the abundance of fresh leaves.

Going back to the home woven dress days, any natural shade of beige or brown would have looked quite peasant. The phrase "who gets married while wearing brown lives outside the city" was an implication of being a peasant and never being able to adapt to the city.

The light yellow tone enjoyed varying popularity. It was the fashionable color for some time in the eighteenth century and was worn by many, but before that it was associated with non-Christians and heathens and was therefore a heretical shade that should not be worn in church.

Gray was an extremely common bridal color for brides in the lower classes, as it was a useful color that could be reused as a walking dress and was seen as a highly dignified garment.

In the Victorian era, it was associated with domestic service girls, as their staff gave them a new gray dress each year. Of course, the darker black tone, which was permanently associated with death and mourning, was forbidden. In some places, even guests were not allowed to wear it because it was seen as a bad omen, and those who were widowed recently wore a red dress to mourn the bride for that day. This deepened the dislike for red, which is seen as wedding mourning.

Those who, due to their economy, had to wear clothes that would soon become ordinary daily wear, made special decorations for the day with temporary decorations. Until the nineteenth century, ribbons were tied in bows or "love knots" and added loosely to the dress. These “bridal ties” were pulled by guests during the post-ceremony entertainment and kept as wedding gifts or keepsakes. This tradition gradually disappeared and was replaced by flowers. Guests were given flowers that were attached to the collar and the bride wore flowers in her hair, or as a wreath around the bodice or skirt, or met as a bouquet. The tradition continues today. Throughout Europe and North America it is customary for the bride to toss her bouquet at the reception and all the women present try to catch it. It is said that the woman who catches the bouquet will be the next to marry. So why?

In medieval Europe, it was not normally expected for a bride to wear the wedding dress again, and the dress was seen as a source of good luck for other women, just like a fertility charm. After the wedding, single women chased the bride and ripped off pieces of her dress, leaving it in rags. Over time, wedding dresses became more expensive and it was customary for women to keep them as a souvenir or to give to their daughter at her wedding. To keep her wedding dress from tearing, the brides began throwing other objects as a distraction, one of which was a knee brace.

Later the bouquet became the most traditional throwing object. A wedding bouquet is particularly well suited for this, as flowers symbolize fertility and are not something the bride would want to keep, as they are susceptible to spoilage. The bouquet is also a safer object to throw than a knee brace, as impatient and unruly wedding guests would sometimes try to get this knee brace from the bride while she was still wearing it.