Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

The white wedding dress didn’t become popular until 1840, when twenty-year-old Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, her cousin, in a formal white gown trimmed with orange blossoms. The event was not photographed—fourteen years later, after the appropriate technology had developed, Victoria and Albert would pose for a reenactment wedding portrait—but British newspapers provided lengthy descriptions of Victoria’s wedding crinolines, her satin slippers, her sapphire brooch, her golden carriage, and her three-hundred-pound wedding cake. The symbolic link between “bride” and “royalty” was forged with Victoria, and would eventually intensify into the idea of a wedding as “a sort of Everywoman’s coronation,” as Holly Brubach wrote in The New Yorker in 1989.