This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in Images for East Bernard Express, February 2, 2023.
Both my grandmothers wore elegant black dresses for their weddings. At many funerals, such as the recent service for Queen Elizabeth II, all ladies attending wore black dresses as a sign of mourning.
After recently looking at photos of both my grandmothers’ black wedding dresses and viewing Her Majesty’s funeral on television, I raised the question: How can a black dress be appropriate at both a wedding and a funeral?
First of all, I thought for many years only Texas Wendish brides wore black to symbolize the hardships and difficulties they would face on the Texas frontier in the 1800’s, having immigrated here from Germany. That’s what I was told by numerous other Wends over the years.
The problem with such a theory is the fact that one of my grandmothers was German, not Wendish. This puzzled me for a long time.
Recently, however, a Facebook friend from Germany wrote that many Lutheran brides in Germany, both Germans and Wends, wore black wedding dresses, as it was a way to show seriousness rather than frivolity.
As I researched further this black wedding dress phenomenon, I found that in other cultures, in other countries, it was not uncommon to wear a black wedding dress. In some examples, black was worn to express hardship and difficulty as the marriage occurred during a major war, like World War I. In other examples, black was worn because it was considered formal and because it was costly.
Black has long been accepted as proper formal attire, whether a man’s tux or a woman’s dress, especially black worn with some white. In early times, dyeing cloth black was very expensive, requiring lots of dye and having to use only certain fabrics, thus owning a black dress was not possible for folks with low incomes.
The best natural black dye was Logwood or Campeachy. One of the best fabrics for dyeing black was silk, and silk was expensive. It was not uncommon to own only one black dress, which you wore not only at your wedding, but also on all formal occasions, including funerals.
Black as a sign of mourning was prevalent in Roman times, and the Bible speaks of wearing sackcloth and ashes for mourning, sackcloth made from goat hair, ashes, of course, black.
For many years, in Europe, wearing black was not widely done at funerals, — perhaps because the poor could not afford it. Dressing in black for funerals became a trend, and almost a rule of law, in England after King Albert’s death in 1861, when black dresses were worn by almost all ladies at his funeral. The “requiring” of black at funerals then became pretty standard in America, too.
It’s interesting that in many cultures, wearing a black wedding dress symbolized hardships and difficulties to be faced in the years ahead, and symbolized mourning at funerals, while at the same time, a sign of formality and prosperity.
In the United States today, it is truly rare for a bride to wear black, — at every wedding I’ve been to in my lifetime, the bride has worn white. And, what I notice from old family photos is that both my grandmothers wore white veils and headdresses with their black gowns, black and white together being a sign of elegance and formality, — as well as beauty.
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Ray Spitzenberger is a retired Wharton County Junior College teacher, a retired Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod pastor, and author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.