Books, arts and culture
New exhibition
Great white dress
The V&A's new wedding dresses exhibition focuses on materiality and celebrity, rather than on romance
by K.S.C. | LONDON
THE new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum in London, "Wedding Dresses, 1775-2014", is being held in a small, dimly lit space that curls in on itself and up to a small second floor level, like the interior of a shell. Just in front of you as you step inside is one of the highlights: the dress worn by a London society darling, Margaret Whigham, when she married Charles Sweeny in 1933 (pictured above). It's a creamy satin sheath, embroidered with star-like flowers, with romantic deep bell sleeves and a huge, lozenge-shaped, 3.6-metre train. Just behind the mannequin bride there is British Pathé footage of the couple emerging from the Brompton Oratory, a Catholic church just next door to the V&A, into a surging crowd of uninvited well-wishers before being gathered up and bundled into a waiting car. Perhaps, under the high cupolas and down the wide aisles of the church, the abundance of fabric seemed in proportion, but in the mob, as in the exhibition, the silvery sheen of the train looks a little like the long trails of ooze that snails leave behind on paving slabs.
The dress and the accompanying footage crystallise a sense you get as you walk around the exhibition that weddings have very little to do with marriages, and a great deal to do with conspicuous consumption.
This is not a weakness of the exhibition, nor is it unintentional. Edwina Ehrman, the curator, is open about the evidence on display of the increasing commercialisation of weddings. Some of the earlier clothes, although created specifically for weddings, were kept and later worn for "best". White was increasingly worn because white cloth was prestigious, expensive and very hard to keep clean. But by the 20th century it was accepted practice for both men and women to buy something that they had no intention of wearing again. This is good for the exhibition: such items are more than ordinarily likely to be preserved, and here there are over 80, mostly from Britain. During the second world war, when fabrics were heavily rationed, Elizabeth King, a florist, walked down the aisle in a gown made from a buttercup-patterned upholstery fabric. Make do and mend was all very well but not, apparently, for a bride's big day. The trend for extravagance has continued. In Britain today the wedding industry is worth around £10 billion ($16.8 billion). America spends about three times that amount and in 2012 it was estimated that the industry was worth $321 billion worldwide.
The major pull is on the second floor, where many of clothes have been unleashed from their cases and the exhibition is skewed towards the kind of weddings that keep Hello! magazine in business. Wendy Ramshaw's Little-Bo-Peep mini dress from 1962 sits silk-by-veil with the gray-blue coatdress worn by the Duchess of Cornwall nearly half a century later. Nearby, the midriff-baring tulle and satin explosion that Pam Hogg designed for Mary Charteris, a model and DJ, jostles for attention beside the pink-dipped and peacock-feather Galliano dresses worn by Gwen Stefani and Kate Moss respectively.
Ms Ehrman has stressed the universality of the exhibition, perhaps because it includes the clothes of several people, including the dress belonging to a merchant's daughter married in the late 18th century, whose names will not be known to visitors and because the royal gown from Kate Middleton's wedding to Prince William is absent (although a video of the event is projected onto a wall). Ms Ehrman's assertion feels a little disingenuous, though. This is neither a democratic nor a romantic exhibition, but one of materiality and, particularly on the top floor, notoriety.
"Wedding Dresses" is at the V&A in London until March 2015
More from Prospero
An American musical about mental health takes off in China
The legacy of apartheid
Sue Williamson's art of resistance
Lost, found and lost again
What happened to the "Salvator Mundi"?
Writers' lives
Ernest Hemingway: the man, the myth, the legend
Dying species
Inside HYMAG, the world's largest collection of magazines
The protagonist of "Next to Normal" has bipolar disorder. The show is encouraging audiences to open up about their own well-being
Aesthetics and politics are powerfully entwined in the 50-year career of the South African artist
The recently rediscovered painting made headlines in 2017 when it fetched $450m at auction. Then it vanished again
A new documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick explores the writer's own image-making
Its founder hopes to digitise the 150,000 volumes for the benefit of future generations