A nice day for a black wedding
23 Dec
If I did decide to be a bride, a black wedding dress would so be the way to do it
I’ve never been the sort of girl to daydream about my wedding. For me, the idea of a wedding carries the excitement of being able to dress up in a cute cocktail dress and swill free champagne, but I’ve never really thought about me being the bride. I know a lot of girls my age are already halfway down the aisle, and just take it as a given that that’s how life is supposed to work out at some point in the next ten years – but I’m not so fussed about it all. Maybe that bridal gene will kick in one day, but for now, the idea of bridesmaids and bonbonniere and bouquets and all of that is just so utterly boring I feel sick even thinking about it now.
And yet, a few months back when I saw Vera Wang’s black wedding dresses for her Fall 2012 collection, my heart just leapt, and I immediately printed them all out and blutacked them to my wall. Finally, there it was, the perfect antidote to all this Kate Middleton-style primness: if I did decide to be a bride, this would so be the way to do it.
It’s not that I’m so dark and twisty that I don’t believe in romance. Okay, I might be dark and twisty, but I do have a sickeningly romantic side. In my mind, these inky, moody black gowns just embody romance. With their delicate layering, frothy insets of tulle and elegant detailing they conform to the most exquisite styling of any high-end wedding gown, just with an extra dose of the dramatic. There’s just something so delicious and thrilling about the whole idea of it – and how can a girl resist that kind of drama?
It’s possible that it might be swapping one cliché for another, but I feel like if you’re going to wear a wedding dress that isn’t white, you might as well take it the whole way to really make the statement. To me, a really beautiful, elegant black wedding gown says you don’t have to play the virgin role to have class. You’re a woman of the world, and you can stand on your own two feet, and that doesn’t make you any less “wife material.” You’ve seen stuff and experienced stuff and made mistakes – but you’re still precious and beautiful and deserving of respect and you won’t stand to be treated like you’re not. Plus, it says you’re a bit witchy, a bit mysterious, and that’s always captivating.
I know it’s just a silly symbolic thing, but I feel like maybe if you strip away some of the prim, conservative prissiness of it all, you can express a sense of openness to building new traditions, redefining “marriage” and looking at different ideas of what relationships can be. It’s the perfect solution – still embracing the sense of tradition and fairy-tale-like romance that weddings are supposed to, but bringing a little bit of edginess into the whole creampuff affair. It says, “I’m still romantic and in love and all that, and I will get married – but I’m going to do it my way.”
Besides, Sarah Jessica Parker work a black dress when she married Matthew Broderick, so if you need any more convincing of how utterly cool it is, there you go.
I’ve heard of so many women saying lately that they either are glad they wore a white wedding dress or wish they had because it never goes out of style … but neither does black, or denim really for that matter, so it’s not so much about that as it being a convention that people are still very attached to.
If you adhere to it, you can’t really be faulted because it’s “tradition”, but if you don’t, then there’s a risk that you’ll fail miserably at being a bride. We make so many decisions in our lives that we cringe about later on, and yet we’ll adhere to fashions even knowing that what we thought looked great three years ago we might not be caught dead in now, but your wedding day isn’t afforded that same room for error (reminds me of Rachel Hills’ recent post about your wedding day supposedly being the best you’ll ever look) – at least not where your CLOTHING is concerned!
God forbid you wear something you’re horrified by 10 years later … I mean never mind whether the person you married ended up being a total d-bag (we can forgive that, as long as you played the good wife), at least you wore a white dress dammit!