By Lamont Jones
Pittsburg Post-Gazette
When it comes to wedding fashion, perhaps nothing sets tongues atwitter faster than a visibly pregnant bride walking down the aisle in white. Not ivory, cream or ecru, but pure, blinding, blizzard white.
More maternity bridal designers appear to be offering that option this spring, and more pregnant brides seem comfortable choosing it.
One new design by Motherhood Maternity is a ruffle-tiered chiffon cupcake bridal dress in bright white. White has been the most popular color at MaternityBride.com since the online boutique opened three years ago, accounting for about half of all maternity wedding dress sales, said owner-designer Jessica Iverson.
It takes a strong woman to show up at her nuptials pregnant and wearing white. She’s bound to face criticism.
Starting around the 1950s, white became the standard gown color in the United States for brides who had not been married before, did not have children and were not pregnant. White symbolized purity and virginity.
While this Western notion persists, history offers shades of complexity.
Brides in ancient Greece wore white because it was a color of celebration.
In 1840, Queen Victoria of England raised eyebrows when she wore white for her marriage to Albert of Saxe-Coberg. White wedding gowns were uncommon at the time, and her choice was a sign of wealth rather than a proclamation of virginity or moral purity.
But somewhere along the way, as the white wedding dress became widely popular, it went from fashion statement to moral statement.
In the 50th-anniversary edition of “The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette,” first published in 1952, authors Nancy Tuckerman and Nancy Dunnan wrote that a pregnant bride “must not … walk up the aisle in a traditional wedding dress … if her pregnancy will be very apparent. To do so is quite poor taste, considering her condition, and would probably be interpreted as an act of defiance or rebellion on her part. If the wedding is planned for so far in the future it’s certain she’ll be noticeably pregnant, she and her fiance can cancel their original plans in favor of a smaller, less formal wedding at an earlier date. She may still wear a long dress if she wants to, although a pale color would be more appropriate than all white.”
This view is a reminder that there is still a stigma attached to the conception of children out of wedlock. It suggests that to show proper shame for such immoral behavior, a pregnant bride should don a colored dress to acknowledge her impurity and, while she’s at it, have a low-key ceremony so it doesn’t appear that she’s flaunting her immorality. (Never mind that there’s no equivalent public “sanction” for the father of the unborn child.)
The whole idea is fundamentally punitive and harkens back to the nation’s Puritanical roots and an emphasis on personal piety and the appearance of moral rectitude.
But that scarlet-letter judgmentalism doesn’t honor the moral principle that supposedly undergirds the white-bridal-gown rule. If it did, no woman who has had sex before her wedding would be entitled to wear white.
Given the lifestyle changes in the United States, white would probably be the least common gown color rather than the most popular. Currently, more than half of brides live with the groom before marriage, and a similar percentage are pregnant when they tie the knot, according to bridal-industry surveys.
It was a white-maternity-bridal-dress drama that caused Iverson to start MaternityBride.com and to design white frocks as part of her collections. She was pregnant during her 2004 wedding and had difficulty finding a white bridal gown that fit. “People weren’t helpful,” she said. “It was a complete nightmare.”
She ended up spending a lot of money altering a gown ó and decided to start Maternity Bride. One of her newest designs is a white pleated chiffon gown with detachable beaded straps and a sweep train.
Every now and then, Iverson said, a bride will ask: “Is it OK to wear white? My mom thought it was a little strange that I would want to wear white.”
Her reply?
“This is your wedding day. You do whatever the heck you want.”