Bridesmaid dresses have been a staple of weddings for over 100 years and even today are a fixture for most weddings. For the typical wedding involving two or more bridesmaids, it is standard for the bridesmaids to be wearing dresses of a uniform style and color, thereby providing a canvas for the the bride to show brightly (after all, it is HER day… 🙂 ). However, the bridesmaid dress is often of a style that pleases nobody and in recent years there’s been a lot of resistance to the idea to the point where they’re being dispensed with for some.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th Centuries, wedding customs evolved and by the early 1900s, the typical wedding that we know today had taken form to include the distinct bridesmaid dress. Here are some examples:
Judging from the dress and hat styles, this was probably taken sometime around 1910 or so and what’s striking about it is that the bridesmaid dresses s are fairly uniform. While they appear to be of one style and made from the same material, there are variations in the trim on each woman’s skirt.
And here’s a few more from roughly the same time:
In this picture, the bride is almost indistinguishable from the bridesmaids except for the hat.
It’s an interesting to see that uniform bridesmaid dresses were a thing a hundred years ago. In future posts, we’ll look a little further back so stay tuned! 🙂
I would have loved to wear a bridesmaid dress this beautiful, and could be worn again. Modern bridesmaid dresses (at least 10 years ago) were so horrid and couldn’t, on pain of death, be worn again because of their ickyness. The last wedding I was in, I talked the bride into having us “older” brides matrons buy a pastel suit, which was much more flattering than froofy dresses. Sadly, mine only got worn once before it was too small. Those were the days.
Val
The modern bridesmaid dress has definitely gotten a bad rap and deservedly so. Most people hate them yet they still continue to sell. Unfortunately, the typical bridesmaid dress often fails to work well across various figure types and as a result, almost nobody is happy. Also, by its very nature, it tends to be bland just by the very nature of its purpose which is to act as a backdrop for the bride. However, it appears that there’s been serious push-back in recent years and designers/end-users are re-thinking the whole concept. It definitely could use a re-think.