Wedding dress
dress worn by a bride during the wedding ceremony
A wedding dress or bridal gown is the dress worn by the bride during a wedding ceremony.
In Western culture, the wedding dress is most commonly white, a tradition popularised by elites in the Victorian era after Queen Victoria wore a white dress at her wedding to Prince Albert.
In Eastern cultures, such as Chinese and Indian cultures, brides will often wear red to their weddings to symbolize auspiciousness.
History
Western culture
Historically, weddings have often symbolised a strategic union between families, businesses, kingdoms, or nations. Brides were expected to dress according to their status, with women from wealthy families donning rich colours and exclusive fabrics, such as furs, velvet, and silk. Brides from lower social strata wore their best church dress on their wedding day.
Color
The first documented instance of a royal bride wearing a white wedding dress was that of Philippa of England. She wore a tunic with a cloak in white silk bordered with squirrel and ermine in 1406, when she married Eric of Pomerania.
Similarly, Mary, Queen of Scots, wore a white wedding dress in 1559 when she married her first husband, Francis, the Dauphin of France.
This was not a widespread trend, however: prior to the Victorian era, a bride was married in any color, black being popular in Finland.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q170063. The Library of Congress control number is sh85145897. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1406 and 1559.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wedding dress” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.