Stevie Cameron
Foreword

As I read many of the stories you’ll find here, the same thing happened: my eyes prickled with tears and I would pause for several minutes, engulfed in memories of my own wedding and all the hope and joy and worry I felt so many years ago. These stories, each so different, each so beautifully written, describe the same emotions – hope, joy and worry. But not all of them. A few also recall irritation, usually driven by a family’s demands or expectations, or panic, coming from a bride’s knowledge that this marriage was going to be a mistake. Some of the stories are simpler–funny, even slapstick. But most of them share three common themes: the complex relationship between a mother and a daughter, the longing for a perfect wedding outfit and the hope for love.

And even when their mothers were impossible and their husbands worse, almost every one of these brides remembers every detail of her wedding outfit, whether it was a traditional white dress with a veil or a trim pantsuit or a silk sari shot with gold thread, or even just something thrown together in a ­last-­minute fit. She remembers how she found it – the store or sister’s closet or grandmother’s attic, the price, the anxiety. But so many of these writers also tell stories of their mothers’ weddings and their mothers’ dresses, showing how family memories and traditions, for better or for worse, end up tangled in their own experience.

Some of the stories illustrates some of the rules surrounding weddings when I was a girl: pregnant brides, previously married brides or widows and, yes, “older” brides (i.e., anyone over, say, thirty-five) almost always wore suits or cocktail dresses, usually pale beige, pale blue or pink, usually at small family weddings held at City Hall or a country club, restaurant, hotel or a large living room–almost never in a church. But when Jackie Kennedy went to Valentino for the short, ­cream-­coloured lace dress worn at her wedding to Aristotle Onassis in 1968, five years after her husband’s assassination, it was considered exactly right. Marrying the froggy Onassis for his money – she required twenty million dollars up front – shocked the world, but she did much to rectify her mistake with a perfect outfit. Not frilly, long, or in any sense bridal, but pretty and celebratory.

Maybe that’s when things began to change. Jackie made it okay to wear white or at least cream for a second wedding. Odd, isn’t it, this whole white wedding thing? For women in most North American and European cultures it seems to have started in the early 1800s, although most women still wore coloured dresses at that time. It was only when Queen Victoria married Albert of ­Saxe-­Cobourg in 1840, wearing a dainty white dress with a little bustle and a lot of lace, that women settled on the colour that remains dominant to this day. Three other wedding dresses have had almost as much influence: those of American actress Grace Kelly, British aristocrat Diana Spencer and American socialite Carolyn Bessette. Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956 wearing ­twenty-­five yards of white taffeta, one hundred yards of silk net and an antique rose-point lace veil, a dream outfit with a high neck and long sleeves designed by Helen Rose and given to Kelly by her studio, MGM. The prince wanted a big dowry, so Kelly’s father gave him two million dollars; Kelly herself had to agree to a fertility test.

Royal weddings have always inspired wedding fashion, even Princess Margaret’s wedding in May 1960 to her ­second-­choice groom, commoner Anthony ­Armstrong-­Jones, who was only slightly preferable to the Royal Family over her true love, divorced commoner Peter Townsend. Poor Margaret, always slightly frumpier than her steadfastly frumpy sister, Queen Elizabeth, had her dress copied all over the world.

Until 1981, Grace Kelly’s dress remained the ultimate for many brides. But that year the sight of Lady Diana Spencer emerging from a carriage at Westminster Abbey in the pouffiest of pouffy cream silk taffetas and, at twenty-five yards, the longest train in British royal history, led to a huge demand for enormous puffed sleeves, vast skirts and lashings of lace. In all, the dress, designed by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, had a hundred yards of tulle for the crinoline, a hundred and fifty yards of netting for the veil and ten thousand ­mother-­of-­pearl sequins and beads. Like Grace Kelly’s, the dress showed nary an inch of Diana’s skin except her smiling face. Even her hands were covered in white gloves.

Everything changed when Carolyn Bessette married John Kennedy Jr. in 1996. Her ­bias-­cut crêpe silk slip-dress, designed by Narciso Rodriguez, was held up with thin straps and showed plenty of skin; only a woman as tall and thin as she could have carried it off. Even her feet were bare. And after the wedding hundreds of thousands of women wanted to look just like her. A dress as unforgiving as Carolyn Bessette’s was impossible for most brides, so many turned to strapless, backless numbers instead and today it is almost impossible to find a wedding dress that isn’t strapless. Not the best choice for many brides, but they persist.

Well, as they say, in my day such a thing was unheard of. Back in the 1960s we all wore modest dresses, usually with sleeves, high necklines, veils and trains, often with white kid gloves, always with white shoes and pearls. Weddings, especially in churches, were considered sacraments and anything that showed too much back or front was . . . highly inappropriate. Well, embarrassing, really. My own always stylish mother, despite the six-week interval between her meeting my father and marrying him, and despite wartime scarcities, found an organdy and chiffon gown with a high ­square-­cut neck, a full, sweeping skirt and a big picture hat; she carried the most beautiful bouquet I have ever seen. Ever. I went upstairs to look at her picture just now and to my surprise she was as gorgeous as I had thought she was and most appropriate. I still have the recipes from the wedding supper party held at our cottage and they still work. The marriage, however, was a disaster.