custom, part two
A few months ago, my husband and I watched Funny Face. Oh, you haven’t seen it? If you can get past the 30 year age difference between Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, though it’s too often forgotten, it’s one of the best flicks of the century. Funny Face is a for-the-time-unconventional romance between a fashion photographer (Astaire) and a bookish philosophy buff (Hepburn). He lures her out of the bookshop with the promise of fulfilling her desire to walk in the footsteps of Sartre and connect with her intellectual inspirations to Paris as the featured model of a new campaign. As their affection grows and sudden conflicts complicate their romance, we get a delightful satire of two idealized extremes of mid-century culture — the polished and high-powered fashion industry, and the grimy expressionism of Montmartre’s bohemian underground — and a series of delightful Gershwin numbers to show off the dance prowess of Astaire and Hepburn.
Our screening wasn’t part of my ongoing and surreptitious efforts to catch him up on classic films. I pulled up the film because “I just wanted to rewatch Hepburn’s iconic dance” through a bohemian café (yeah, that’s it), but, before we knew it, we were sucked in, thinking pink with Kay Thompson and delighting in every step Fred Astaire took. Every moment with Hepburn on screen was mesmerizing, in part because, well, because she’s Audrey Hepburn. But also, and in no small way, because of Hubert de Givenchy’s designs that transformed her Jo Stockton into a runway- and cover-ready model. As each gown appeared, I gasped and gushed about the longtime Givenchy-Hepburn collaboration and about his innovations in mid-century design even and especially beyond the iconic “little black dress” of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Other people might be irritated by my habit, inherited from my mother, of unprompted, pop-up commentary and trivia, but he knew what he was getting into when he married me.
I surprised myself, though, when Hepburn appeared in the climactic wedding dress, a Givenchy masterpiece that perfected and elevated all the trends of 1950s — a softened, tea length ballerina skirt, a trim and simple body with cropped sleeves, a long, low neckline, and a veil that framed and illuminated (rather than hid and diminished) the face. It’s mid-century perfection. When she appeared, my heart and breath stopped until I could mutter, “Oh my god. That’s my mom’s dress.”
No, Givenchy didn’t make my mom’s wedding dress. My mom made it herself to walk down the aisle of St. Juliana’s Church on the northwest side of Chicago for her July 1956 wedding, a solid seven months before Givenchy’s dress floated across the big screen. Reflecting the dominant trends of the era, they shared a silhouette, but Mom’s dress had a sheer overlay with subtle lacework along the hemline, slightly longer sheer sleeves, and a veil that instead of framing her face, was (well, all I can say) perched above it. Both were clearly modern, adopting exposed arms and ankles and rejecting the long skirts, trains, elaborate lacework, frills, and concealing veils that dominated early 20th century bridal fashions.
My shock in that moment wasn’t just because of the similarity of the dresses. My shock stemmed from a sudden insight into how conventional my mother was, how much she reflected the progress and the limitations of her generation. In life as in her wedding dress, she made some bold choices, but she was never an outlier. Suddenly, too, I saw Funny Face as a kind of primary source, a time capsule that gives us a window into that moment’s shifting attitudes about gender and identity. Audrey Hepburn in a wedding dress isn’t just a piece of art come to life — she’s the embodiment of an ideal. The film introduces her character, Jo, as an independent and intelligent intellectual — an outlier among depictions of women in mid-century film — but, because the patriarchy always has to win, she still needs the love of a man and a proper wedding gown to reveal her best and most essential self. Her face, shoulders, arms, and ankles might be revealed, amplifying her confidence and beauty, but she’s still wrapped in layers of tulle and carrying a bouquet to enhance our delight in the delicacy and fragility of her femininity.
For many years, Mom’s dress lay hidden in our attic in a cedar trunk, my mother’s hope chest, and as a kid, I’d occasionally creep up to the attic and gently unpack its contents to be able to sneak a peek. I marveled at the idea that she’d made it, but I also imagined the dress to be a portal to a different place and time. Like a theatrical costume, I’d slip the dress on my tiny 8 or 10 year old body (it stopped fitting with a growth spurt when I was 11), and, by piecing together the glimpses of her wedding that I’d had from old photos and stories told, I’d try to see what my mom saw, to feel what she felt walking down the aisle on the arm of her father and back up it on the arm of my father.
In last week’s reflection, I started to dive into George Monger’s encyclopedic Wedding Customs of the World, which collates information about hundreds of practices that make up wedding traditions. To make some meaning out of practices in Monger’s tome, I’ve been keeping Stephanie Coontz’s fascinating Marriage, a History close as a lens to consider how these practices reflected changes in the institution of and attitudes toward marriage. Curiously, while marriage has radically changed from a social institution to a personal one with the modern era, weddings and their associated traditions have not.
Some might suggest that ritual actions emerge only after cultural shifts are crystallized, but ritual theorists like Catherine Bell have demonstrated the power of ritual and ritual-like practices to shape culture. Ritual can reflect culture, but it also effects it. Through rituals, people can facilitate changes — sometimes radical transformations — in relationships and perceptions, but they can also, quite effectively, reinforce the status quo. With Givenchy and my mom in mind, and putting Monger, Coontz, and Bell in dialogue, my hunch is that communities use wedding ceremonies to both facilitate changes in relationships and to reinforce traditional (and here, I don’t say “traditional” in a pejorative sense — only to mean within the boundaries of a particular cultural or religious tradition) attitudes and beliefs. This extends into depictions of weddings in popular media — depictions of weddings on film and TV do as much as ceremonies themselves to challenge or to bolster those ideas. Think of Funny Face: released in 1957, it uplifts then-new “types” of women — independent, intellectual, employed — but Hepburn still ends up in a white wedding dress with a bouquet of flowers. Sure, the silhouette was innovative, but it still conformed to standards for respectability. My mother’s dress might’ve been modern, but she still marched down a pre-Vatican II Catholic church’s aisle.
Among all the components of the American wedding, the wedding dress is perhaps the most prominent and most anticipated element, but it’s also the most telling about the attitudes toward gender and class that are woven into it. So this week, again diving into Monger’s encyclopedia with a postmodern ritualist’s insights as one lens and Coontz’s history as another, let’s say yes to more context for the dress (#seewhatIdidthere) and consider:
- What does this tell us about its original cultural and social context?
- What assumptions does this practice reflect or reveal about gender, class, religion, or any other aspect of identity?
- How does this practice hold up today?
The White Wedding Dress
“The one family occasion that became more public in the nineteenth century was the wedding, although it was limited to invited guests. When Queen Victoria broke with convention and walked down the aisle to musical accompaniment, wearing pure white instead of the traditional silver and white gown and colored cape, she created an overnight ‘tradition.’ Thousands of middle-class women imitated her example, turning their weddings into the most glamorous event of their lives, an elaborate celebration of their entry to respectable domesticity.”
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History
Before Queen Victoria’s wedding, the standard dress for marrying couples in Europe and North America was their best clothing, what Americans once colloquially called their “Sunday best.” As middle class women started to imitate the monarch, Victoria unwittingly launched an entire industry to outfit brides who would be queen for a day. Of course, we don’t remember Victoria just for her sartorial innovation; as a cultural moniker, “Victorian” evokes prudishness, and the era was characterized by a fierce social and legal crackdown on (among other things designated “deviant”) queer sexualities, the steady dismantlement of home economies and externalization of vital services and resources, and the accompanying erosion of women’s economic authority and social autonomy. The color of her dress didn’t just enhance her royal glow in the sanctuary; it evoked purity and virginity and amplified their importance among women’s virtues. The effect was, perhaps ironically for a queen associated with prim purity, an increased focus on a bride’s sexuality. With the introduction of the white wedding dress, the ceremony became less about the facilitation of social cohesion and more about the transformation of a woman’s body.
Other aspects of bridal fashion illuminate attitudes toward gender and sexuality, too. Consider the veil. It’s been a hot topic for people interested in the status of women in Islam, but most of the arguments coming from non-Muslims are wildly uninformed about the origins of the practice of veiling. For a thorough study of the role of the veil in the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, “The Discourse of the Veil” in Leila Ahmed’s remarkable Women and Gender in Islam is required reading. What most white Christian hijab-haters forget is that veiling has played and continues to play a crucial role in the development of European and North American attitudes toward women. Until the modern era, women were required to cover their heads in most Christian churches — Catholic women covered their heads until the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s! For Muslims, the veil is a tool (sometimes chosen, sometimes imposed) for modesty, but, for European Christians, veiling was a literal application of the apostle Paul’s first letter to the Christian community at Corinth.
“But I want you to know that Christ is the head of every man, and a husband the head of his wife, and God the head of Christ.
Any man who prays or prophesies with his head covered brings shame upon his head. But any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled brings shame upon her head, for it is one and the same thing as if she had had her head shaved. For if a woman does not have her head veiled, she may as well have her hair cut off. But if it is shameful for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should wear a veil.
A man, on the other hand, should not cover his head, because he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; nor was man created for woman, but woman for man; for this reason a woman should have a sign of authority on her head, because of the angels. Woman is not independent of man or man of woman in the Lord. For just as woman came from man, so man is born of woman; but all things are from God.
Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head unveiled? Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears his hair long it is a disgrace to him, whereas if a woman has long hair it is her glory, because long hair has been given her for a covering?”
I Corinthians 11:3–15
Ever wonder why good manners and etiquette manuals dictate that a man remove his hat inside? Or why women at British weddings wear such fancy fascinators? Or why elaborate hats were standard for women in Black churches? Or why people freaked out when Jim Morrison grew his hair out or when Sinead O’Connor shaved hers off? It all comes back to Paul’s fakakta logic to justify structural misogyny. Over the course of Christian history, women covered their heads with whatever head coverings were on trend. Ancient veils gave way to medieval wimples (which became the standard headdress for nuns); wimples gave way to more elaborate Renaissance hats and bonnets, sometimes with long trains for dramatic effect or as a demonstration of affluence. Veils only became standard for wedding dresses when wedding dresses were distinguished from other garments in the 18th century. Veils emerged as a tool to shield women’s faces from modernity, to make sure their bodies and sexual autonomy remained in the Middle Ages, and to reinforce Paul’s instruction on gender hierarchy.
This is not to say that the white wedding dress only reflected gender and sexuality. It became a potent cultural and political symbol. The adoption of white wedding dresses around the world, such as the trend Walter Edwards explores in Modern Japan Through Its Weddings, especially in cultures where brides traditionally donned red or other vibrant colors, is just one more data point for tracking the influence of European and North American cultures. Also, as Monger notes, white wedding dresses, associated with Western capitalism, were banned in Stalin’s Russia, but after his death brides wore white dresses as a form of dissident activity. Still, it’s hard to wrest the white wedding dress from the grip of Victorian morality and all the misogyny it perpetuated. When a bride dons the white dress and veil today, she, perhaps unwittingly, also wraps herself in that history and enters a new phase of her life with Paul weighing heavily on one shoulder and Victoria on the other.
Its perpetuation of harmful and outdated attitudes about gender and sexuality, though, isn’t the only, hmm…let’s say interesting aspect of the traditional white wedding dress. It also perpetuates harmful attitudes about class and socio-economic access. This is best demonstrated in a practice that has been sentimentally reenacted in countless films and TV shows. A bride-to-be, accompanied by a gaggle of besties, arrives for her appointment at a bridal boutique. She tries on a dozen gowns, looking for “the one” while her ladies sip champagne and giggle. When she finds it, she steps before the mirror and they all burst into tears. The practice has become an essential pre-wedding event for many wedding parties who have been convinced by the Wedding Industrial Complex that such an experience is exclusively reserved for blushing brides.
It’s hard to imagine now, in the world of 5’x5’ department store dressing rooms, but that’s how all dresses used to be made. A woman purchasing a dress would arrive at a dressmaker’s shop, accompanied by friends, family, or a chaperone, to select a pattern, fabrics, and notions and return for lengthy fittings and alterations. Though daily business for tailors and dressmakers, it was often an elegant affair, with comfortable couches for lounging and refreshments served during long sessions. Well, it’s not how all dresses were made. It’s how dresses were made for affluent women during a time in which one’s relationship with dressmakers, haberdashers, and ateliers (not just the labels one could flash) reflected and effected one’s standing in high society. By preserving this method in the creation and consumption of bespoke wedding dresses, the Wedding Industrial Complex has not only enhanced a woman’s access to being “queen for a day;” it has also perpetuated — I’d even say glorified — an elitist practice and the world in which it emerged.
