What a Bride Might Wear

Everyone knows what a wedding dress is like.
Emily Post, 1910

There was an announcement earlier this summer from The Kate — a museum dedicated to all things related to the actress Katharine Hepburn — that the museum will put Hepburn’s 1928 wedding dress on display.
Here’s a photo of the dress:

You’ll notice at once that this pretty gown isn’t all white, which got me to thinking about the current expectation in the U.S. that a bride is supposed to wear a white wedding dress.

Here’s how Hepburn described her wedding dress in her autobiography, Me:

I had a pretty dress – a Babani. It was crushed white velvet with antiqued gold embroidery sort of around the neck and a bit down the front and on the sleeves.

from Me by Katharine Hepburn, p. 102

Now, I thought that the tradition of wearing an all-white bridal gown dates back to Queen Victoria and her 1840 wedding. That’s when Victoria wore an all-white dress for her wedding, which influenced everyone —or so they say—to wear an all-white wedding dress for their own weddings.

But it’s not as simple as that.

In my not-very-rigorous online research, I discovered that, as it turns out, it wasn’t until after WWII that brides in the U..S. fully embraced the idea to follow Victoria’s example and wear an all-white wedding dress. Prior to that, brides in the U.S. wore just a really nice outfit that didn’t always have to be white, despite Victoria’s setting that standard over a century earlier in 1840.

Even Emily Post acknowledges in her book Etiquette (1910) that a bride usually wears white but might wear something other than white if the wedding ceremony is not in a church and the bride needs to wear a traveling outfit in order to be able to make a quick getaway to the honeymoon afterwards. (Well, Emily Post doesn’t actually use the phrase “quick getaway”). My point is that even Emily Post’s “rules” for a bride in 1910 were flexible with regard to the bridal gown color.

Now, the announcement about Katharine Hepburn’s wedding dress caught my eye because I happened to see the announcement about it in the newspaper back when I was researching the Stanton family of photographers. At that time, I had just been reading the wedding announcements for all three of the Stanton daughters.

It was the 1916 description of Ruby Stanton McArtor’s wedding dress that had caught my eye in particular, due to the uniqueness of her outfit, described in the second paragraph of the wedding announcement:

Wearing “a handsome suit of black trimmed in broad white braid” to your own wedding?! How unique and non traditional. At least, that’s what I thought when I first read this.

Except … now I’m not so sure that either Katharine Hepburn or Ruby Stanton was really breaking with any “all-white dress rule” with their wedding dresses, since in both 1916 and 1928 the “rules” for wedding dress colors in the U.S. were still a little more flexible than they became after WWII.

Anyway, weeks after I read Ruby Stanton McArtor’s wedding announcement, I happened to run across a photo on ancestry.com of Ruby and her husband, John Earle McArtor. I should note that this photo is not labelled as showing Ruby’s wedding outfit by the person who posted it on ancestry.com.

However, I think in the photo below, Ruby could be described as wearing “a handsome suit of black, trimmed in broad white braid …. [with] boots and gloves [in] white.” So I think it’s plausible that this photo shows Ruby in her beautiful wedding outfit.

See what you think.

In any case, enjoy this very nice photo of of Ruby Stanton McArtor … a bride who wore black.