Before Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, brides wore whatever they liked - or whatever they had. Red was popular in some European regions. Blue symbolised purity in Christian tradition (associated with the Virgin Mary). Green was fashionable in Celtic cultures. Black was perfectly acceptable. The idea was to wear your best dress, whatever colour that happened to be.
Victoria chose white not to signal purity but to show off the Honiton lace she'd commissioned from English craftswomen. It was a political and aesthetic choice, not a moral one. She wanted the lace to be visible, and white set it off best.
Fashion magazines covered the wedding extensively. Wealthy women copied the look. By the time Victoria's daughters married, white had become the aspirational choice for those who could afford it. By the early 20th century, it had acquired the purity symbolism retroactively - as if the tradition had always meant that, when in fact it was a century-old trend with a fairly practical origin.
White also carried a practical signal: only the wealthy could afford to own a white dress they'd wear once. You couldn't rewear white to church, to the market, to a dinner. It stained too easily. Wearing white was, in itself, a display of financial comfort.
The lesson that keeps recurring in the history of tradition: meaning is assigned after the fact. Something happens, people like it, it spreads, and then a story is built around why it had to be that way. The story becomes the tradition. The origin gets quietly forgotten. Diamond engagement rings followed the same pattern a century later.
Knowing this doesn't diminish the tradition. But it does free you from thinking it was inevitable.
