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5 days ago
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Weddings tend to be formulaic. Vows. Champagne. Dancing. But, recently, one crucial element is becoming harder to predict: the dress. Instead of choosing traditional white, many brides are opting for something with a bit more of an impact. The anti-trad bridal dress is on the rise. Searches on Pinterest are up 240% for “unique wedding dresses”, while blush pink wedding dresses are up 60% and black 50%.
On Wednesday, the fashion designer Ashish Gupta, whose dazzling sequined pieces are loved by fans including Beyoncé and Rihanna, launched his first bridal range. Instead of trad white gowns, you’ll find a sheer trapeze-shaped dress adorned with delicate hand-embroidered organza flowers in yellow and lilac that look as if they have been plucked from Martha Stewart’s cutting garden, and a halterneck mini-dress smothered in multicoloured glass bead fringing, inspired by Holi, the Hindu festival of colour. Even the customary veil has been reimagined. Ashish’s “confetti” version features shimmering, multicoloured sequins and beads.
Gupta describes his typical bridal customer as non-traditional: “She doesn’t care much for rules and possibly has no idea what ‘something blue’ is supposed to be. She’s fun, a bit irreverent, and loves colour and sparkle. It’s less fairytale, but more magic.”
The wedding dress retailer David’s Bridal has also got the colour memo. This week, it launched a collaboration with Marchesa, the New York womenswear brand co-founded by Georgina Chapman. The designer has been working to reposition her brand as a red carpet staple, following her divorce from the disgraced Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. Featuring more than 40 dresses, the collaboration’s colour chart spans everything from zesty limes and hot crimsons to grey and charcoal. A style of tulle gown embellished with black petal embroidery that Chapman wore to accompany her boyfriend, the actor Adrien Brody, to this year’s Golden Globes will also be available to buy for brides to be.
David’s Bridal CEO, Kelly Cook, speaking to the Wall Street Journal, said the collection was inspired by brides increasingly searching for unique dresses. “They’re wearing cowboy boots with couture.”
Kate Halfpenny, whose Halfpenny London bridalwear brand is celebrating 20 years, has also seen a shift towards more distinctive styles. Among her made-to-order customers, blush has become a favourite while she has also dressed several brides in black-and-white separates.
When Harriet Hall, features director of Cosmopolitan UK, got married in 2020, she did so in a hot pink tulle dress by the British designer Molly Goddard. Five years later and she has no regrets describing it as her “favourite dress in the world.” Hall says she chose the “electric pink Brillo pad” style as she wanted something fun. But it was also a push back against patriarchal traditions.
Writing in British Vogue, Hall described it as not a wedding gown but a showstopper. “It was a dress so in-your-face that it rejected any suggestion of the virginal purity, wifely subservience or impassivity that white dresses can come to symbolise. Yes, it was pink, but I’m not talking blush, peach, candy, nor the problematic ‘nude’. No, this was a hue so electric the frock appeared to emit its own glow, a colour Elsa Schiaparelli referred to in the 1940s as ‘shocking pink’; so loud it was subversive.”
Goddard’s most recent collection featured a range of colourful millefeuille-esque dresses spanning everything from azure blue to apricot. While not being bridal specific, they would work for any bride with a similar brief.
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As refreshing as it is to see brides ripping up the rulebook, perhaps the anti-trad dress isn’t that modern after all. As TikTok’s literary fans recently pointed out, a photo showing Margot Robbie on the set of Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming film Wuthering Heights in a white wedding dress is historically incorrect. The book is set in the Georgian era, a time where red, pink, blue and black wedding dresses were standard. It was only in 1840 when Queen Victoria married Prince Albert that white wedding gowns became the norm.
Elizabeth Taylor wore a canary yellow dress for her nuptials in 1964. Sarah Jessica Parker got married in a black dress in 1997, as did Chloë Sevigny in 2020. In India and China, it’s red that is the tradition. Gupta says that even a white dress doesn’t have “to take itself so seriously”, pointing to a mini slip dress enveloped in sequins. “I don’t think one has to follow the rulebook any more,” he says. “It’s more important to be fabulous and have fun on your big day.”
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