marzipanandminutiae:
marzipanandminutiae:
god every so o...
god every so often I remember the Adam Ruins Everything wedding episode and feel my soul leave my body to Shriek in the void
from “Americans had weddings in filthy barns with like three people present, wearing drab clothes that wouldn’t show stains, until Queen Victoria wore a white wedding dress (that could only be worn once because of its color) to show off her wealth”
to “the DeBeers corporation invented THE CONCEPT OF ENGAGEMENT RINGS in the 1930s to sell diamonds”
it’s just a bunch of hot historical garbage
if anyone’s wondering: getting married in the best clothes you have is a VERY long-standing tradition in many cultures the world over, even for poor people.
there’s a history of white being a favored color for wedding dresses in England and English-colonizer communities dating back at least to the 18th century.
rural American weddings in the 18th and 19th centuries sometimes involved night-long parties for the whole community, and certainly had some type of celebration even when they were more private
Queen Victoria’s wedding dress was white because, again, long-standing tradition + trying to set off English-made Honiton lace to advantage (partially aesthetic, partially to quell concerns that she was more German than English) + eschewing the popular silver and gold royal wedding dresses as a subtle sign that her marriage was for love, not alliance + Have You Ever Considered That Maybe She Just Wanted A White Dress?
she DEFINITELY wore it more than once, posing for portraits and photographs in it until it no longer fit her. and reusing wedding dresses was quite common even for upper-class brides of the era
and finally, DeBeers invented only the idea that an engagement ring HAD to be a diamond and cost a certain amount of money. giving a woman a ring as a token of engagement dates back centuries, though trends in stones have varied. for instance, fashionable late-Victorian brides might hope for a ring set with their birthstone
