If you follow FBOFW, what follows will make sense.
OK, now I could be completely wrong about this, because I of course cannot find a cite, but it strikes me that Grandma Marian’s dress being sleeveless is completely anachronistic.
If you don’t follow FBOFW, the dress mentioned above is presumably 1940s era. According to the FBOFW web site, Jim and Marian married when he returned from service in WW II.
The thing I think I remember (you know how that goes!) about wedding dress fashion is that, in 1968, everyone was all atwitter over Tricia Nixon’s sleeveless wedding gown. Before this, brides did NOT expose their arms!
Can someone either corroborate this or set me straight?
I’m not very up on the history of wedding gowns, but I think that dress isn’t sleeveless- the sleeves are just drawn to look really sheer- see the fourth panel here. That said, I don’t get a real 40s vibe from that either. It’s a little too froofy and ‘princess-y’ for someone who wasn’t a society bride. No cite to back that up, though, just having watched a bunch of movies and my grandparents’ wedding pictures- didn’t most brides back then wear something a bit more sensible and understated?
Maybe our local newspaper printing is for shit, because I did NOT notice the sleeves that are very evident, now that you point them out. (Bad printing! Yeah! That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.)
But I’m with you. Seems totally wrong for the '40s.
I still want to know if Tricia Nixon’s dress was trend-setting.
Well, I was going to post pictures from the London Times, which is the only newspaper I have PDFs of at home at 9 on a Saturday night, but their 40’s weddings don’t have pictures. I can certainly scan some from a South Carolina newspaper tomorrow, though, if you’d like. They aren’t sleeveless and I don’t ever recall seeing translucent/netting sleeves, either.
Well, I was going to post pictures from the London Times, which is the only newspaper I have PDFs of at home at 9 on a Saturday night, but their 40’s weddings don’t have pictures. I can certainly scan some from a South Carolina newspaper tomorrow, though, if you’d like. They aren’t sleeveless and I don’t ever recall seeing translucent/netting sleeves, either.
ETA - here’s a (British) site - 1940s Wedding Dresses Photographs | Wartime Wedding Fashion History Pictures - which has styles which I think are pretty typical for America as well (although probably more rationed!) - Sylvia and Frank and Alan and Elgiva (Elgiva?) are examples of exactly what I think of when I imagine 40’s brides - beautiful fitted suits that the bride would probably wear again.
ETAAA - Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress in the 50’s (1953?) had cap-ish sleeves.
Actually, I’d say that sleeveless wedding dresses showed up in the 1920s, disappeared during the Great Depression and WWII, and then appeared again in the '60s. Here’s a pattern for a wedding dress from 1962 that appears to be sleeveless. And here’s a wedding dress from the 1920s that has very small cap sleeves, so most of the bride’s arm is exposed. Here’s a sleeveless pink dress from the 1920s that the state of Nevada claims is a wedding gown.
The scandalousness of Tricia Nixon’s wedding gown was that she was getting married from the frickin’ White House, which calls for a little bit more formality than the neighborhood church.
Yeah, the sleeve came and went a lot. Victorian ball gowns were sleeveless, too. But 40’s dresses, as far as I know, tended to have sleeves (short or long) - not cap or sleeveless.
The sleeves appear and disappear between panels. The bustle appeared out of nowhere earlier this week. The beading on the bodice also comes and goes; it’s nowhere to be seen in Jim’s memory-cloud. And finally, when Jim was reminiscing about his own wedding on the occasion of Mike and Deanna’s, Marian’s gown was entirely different, including but not limited to solid fabric sleeves.
This would be my ideal wedding dress. As you can see, it’s both sleeveless AND vintage.
I think a lot of the time it’s simply cooler-when my cousin was married this past June, the church was un-airconditioned. Also, with all that dancing, you don’t have to worry about sweat stains.
I just went and looked at the comics on the site. That is one crazy gown. I hope it’s called the Sibyl.
And, dude, they drove across town while she was wearing the dress? Who shows up to visit their grandpa in a wedding dress?
The next time I’m at the thrift store, I’m going to buy a wedding dress and wear it when I go to have coffee with my grandparents. Just to see their reactions.
The dress doesn’t say 1940s to me, either, but I’m not a fashion history expert. What bothers me more is how fancy it is. I may be misremembering, but I could swear that some years back when Marian died and Jim was reminiscing, his stories reflected the fact that neither of them had much money when they first married - but they made do. I can’t reconcile that with the fancy wedding gown. A working class bride of the 1940s simply wouldn’t have taken on that sort of debt for a gown she’d wear once in her life!
(Good lord, that strip has gotten depressing! Senile fathers, tepid brides…didn’t it used to be funny? I remember reading it as a kid, and it always made me smile, if not laugh out loud.)
For some reason the link isnt working for me, but it is really only fairly recently that specific clothing for weddings has become normal. In general prior to 1900 you simply wore your best dress, so any era that had sleeveless gowns [and I am specifically thinking regency grecian revival] would have been sleeveless gowns worn for someones wedding. Only the seriously rich would have bothered to buy a special dress for a single use, and in general, it would be worn as a formal gown after the wedding.
My mother got married in 1948 - I have her dress. It’s heavy cream slipper satin. If it weren’t for the illusion neckline, it would be a fairly low-cut, slightly off-the-shoulder dress. The illusion covering the chest is heavily beaded, as is the neckline. The sleeves are long with the pointed cuffs, which have similar beading. The skirt has a slight train - again with beading (when I say beading they’re mocha & cream colored bugle beads - I’m not certain what their original color might have been). It has a fitted waist. The veil was very long (now pretty much disintegrated) and had “crown” made of loops of the beading. I wish I had color photos of the wedding, but it was done in B&W. Beautiful dress, though.
