15 Pieces of History That Victoria Did Differently
By Lacy Baugher
Tom Hughes as Prince Albert and Jenna Coleman as Victoria
(C) ITV Plc
Victoria’s White Wedding Dress Was a Big Deal
To be fair, Victoria didn’t get actually this wrong. The queen’s wedding dress on the show is beautiful and completely white. But the TV version only offhandedly mentioned the fact that Victoria specifically chose to wear white. It didn’t go into the reasons she did so, or even really note what an unusual choice it was.
Royalty and extremely well-to-do British women frequently chose to wed in colors or metallics – most often silver, or cloth of gold. Red was another popular color at the time. (It generally symbolized fertility.) While white wedding dresses have have come to signify purity and/or chastity, they didn’t quite mean the same thing back in the nineteenth century. Textiles and fabrics were often used to indicate the wealth of the wearer. Rich fabrics, rare colors – all these things were indicators of how rich you were if you were able to wear them. Before better, cheaper bleaching techniques existed, white was a valuable color simply because it was difficult to make. (So, no, Victoria wasn’t the first person to get married in white, but it was a deeply odd decision.)
However, Victoria chose white not to indicate her wealth (though as a woman entering a marriage as a queen in her own right she may have wanted her dress to stand out in that way). But she also wanted to support the English textile industry. The rise of manufactured lace was severely damaging the cottage lace industry in England. So Victoria chose to use a very large piece of Honiton lace, handmade in Devon, to adorn her wedding dress. The rest of the outfit is basically a vehicle to show off this lace. And Honiton lace did become massively popular throughout the country after her wedding ceremony.
You can view a 360-degree version of the television version of Victoria’s wedding dress here. And this is the real version – or what’s left of it. Much of the original lace on the skirt got recycled into other dresses. And Victoria wore her wedding lace repeatedly to other events over the years. Even the portraits of the queen taken at her Diamond Jubliee celebrations in 1897 feature this same bit of lace worn with her mourning attire. (She wore black for the rest of her life after Albert died in 1861.)
