From busy and bejewelled meringues to stripped-down stunners, the bride brings with her a frisson of excitement. Weighed down by somethings old, new, borrowed and blue, the history of marital fashion is heavy with symbolism. As the ultimate wedding party comes to Bendigo, an enduring fairytale is set in train.
THERE is a moment on every bride's wedding day when she slips out of her old life and into The Dress. The moment's symbolism is fleeting, dissolving into the fuss and stress of a hundred more pressing moments as she is laced, buttoned, coiffed, fluffed and perfumed by a cluster of maids and women relatives but, one day, perhaps years after she feels that slither and scratch of a new life's fabric moving across her skin, the weight of its symbolism will return. She will look back and see her wedding dress as a potent marker in her life; who she was, how and where she fitted in to that place and that time. In broad terms, her dress will also be a sartorial snapshot of her demographic and culture. And it will be as eloquent whether she chose an extravagant meringue-puff of sugar-white silk or a slithery column of Hollywood-bombshell ivory satin.
Every "gown", whatever its composition, heaves with the history of its bride and her time. It is our general fascination with that history behind the exhibition, The White Wedding Dress: Two Hundred Years of Wedding Fashions.
It was curated from London's Victoria and Albert Museum but will have its world premiere at the Bendigo Art Gallery on August1 with a specially curated local component. The Australian Aesthetic will include historic gowns and several contemporary designs by couturiers Toni Maticevski, Martin Grant, Gwendolynne Burkin, Susan Dimasi and Chantal McDonald of MaterialByProduct, Akira Isogawa, and Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales of Romance Was Born. The core exhibition will travel on to NewZealand in December and back for a home-town debut at the V&A in 2013. More than 40 complete bridal ensembles were shipped from Britain on upright, dressed mannequins.
A selection of veils, shoes, purses and wedding paraphernalia, including grooms' outfits, dating to the 19th century, will be presented with them. "It's international in its scope," says the London-based curator of textiles and fashion at the V&A, Edwina Ehrman. "But also, very British in its focus."
The White Wedding Dress is firmly in the league of Bendigo Art Gallery's other record-breaking V&A fashion event, The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-57 in 2008-09. The difference is this show's unique distillation of real women's tastes, hopes, personality and reality.
"We did a lot of research," Ehrman says, "to find out actually who these women were; where they were from, where they married, what religion, descriptions of their wedding, even who threw flowers." The research by Ehrman's and Bendigo Art Gallery's staff will be mounted as rare photographs, text plates and looped newsreels of such whimsical blips in history as English socialite Margaret Whigham's 1933 London wedding to the Irish American, Charles Sweeny. The divine Miss Whigham, later the notorious divorcee the Duchess of Argyll, wore a draped and clingy bell-sleeved cream satin gown by the British couturier, Norman Hartnell. It was spangled with star-like embroidered flowers and a four-metre train dragged elegantly behind her.
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