WEDDING
White Gown
The white wedding dress: Showcasing the (commoditized) body
The wedding dress as body-dominant or body-subordinate
"The 'traditional' or lavish wedding denotes a religious setting, a bride dressed in a long, white gown, a multi-tiered white cake, abundant flowers, attendants in matching finery, a reception, and a honeymoon and is the dominant form in much of global culture today" (Iovan et al. 2011:29). A critical component of this festivity is finding the appropriate wedding gown, an aspect of the wedding that is often equally as storied and ceremonious as the actual wedding itself.
On the surface, the practice of dressing one's self in a long, white gown in the style of a Victorian or medieval maiden might seem to be a body-subordinate practice (i.e., a practice which conceals the body). Even in the most modern weddings, many brides' legs are concealed, with only their waists, breasts, and arms prominently displayed. However, the focus which is lavished upon the visible aspects of the female body during a wedding clearly highlights the wearing of the wedding dress as a body-dominant practice, one which is designed to highlight and display the body in a prominent fashion. Not only is a wedding dress supposed to be a unique and memorable article of finery which is worn once -- the woman's body is ideally supposed to be at its 'most beautiful' compared to the woman's usual state of being.
More and more brides are intent not only upon finding their dream dress but also strive to ensure that their body is equally perfect. The emphasis in modern wedding culture is to ensure that the bride's body conforms to the needs of the dress rather than tailoring the dress to the body. Extreme dieting, shape wear, and bridal dress-specific workouts are all reflective of this phenomenon. "A 2007 Cornell University study by Lori Neighbors and Jeffery Sobal found that 70% of 272 engaged women said they wanted to lose weight, typically 20 pounds" for the wedding with the aim of specifically fitting into their white dress (Lee 2012).
Although fad diets and 'lose weight quickly' schemes are usually destined for failure, an entire subset of the wedding industry has cropped up intent upon helping women fit into their dresses. A recent New York Times article chronicled the story of one woman who deliberately changed her shape to fit in her grandmother's wedding gown: "Women were smaller back then, and there was nothing to let out…She took prescription pills, had vitamin B shots and made weekly $45 visits to a Medithin clinic in Janesville, Wis. When she married on March 18, she was back to 125 pounds [from 159]; the gown, from 1938, fit perfectly" (Lee 2012). 800 calorie diets and three-hour workouts are the 'norm' amongst some affluent classes of women and aggressively changing their body to fit the white dress is part of the 'bridal sport' of racing to the altar.
If wedding dresses were not body-dominant, this emphasis on the woman's body would not be an issue. Instead, the woman must sculpt her body to fit the ideal of the young, untouched maiden associated with the white wedding dress, no matter how far in actuality she may be from that ideal. As more and more women marry at ages when they are unlikely to be at the peak of youthful perfection, this obsession with looking young and thin on one's wedding day has only grown more intense. This focus upon the toned body was not nearly as intense in previous, less physically conditioned eras of course. But today, having a sculpted physique is just as much evidence of one's affluence (the ability to hire a personal trainer or to go on an expensive juice cleanse) as one's discipline.
The thin, youthful body in a white wedding dress today thus reveals the woman's affluence just as much as the pure white wedding dress that would never be worn again did for middle-class Victorians. Body-consciousness has expanded in the dress' ability showcase the bride's ability to spend money on expensive diets and workouts to look ready for the altar. Even the sizing scale of wedding dresses virtually mandates this aspirational quality to beauty. "Wedding dresses run small, so a typical size 8 dress will be a size 10 or 12 (Lee 2012). For a woman to be an 'acceptable' size, she is, in effect, forced to diet.
The unique aesthetic of the wedding dress
On one hand, given the proliferation of different types of wedding dresses and weddings, it might seem as if the old type of wedding dress is no longer standard....
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