Angel’s Reviews > The Way We Wed: A Global History of Wedding Fashion > Status Update

“The dress—stiffened with buckram at the hem and a cagelike boned bustle—was so rigid that it could stand up by itself.”

reflects the rigid roles and traditions of the time

“If royal marriages were arranged to create dynastic alliances, wedding clothes reinforced those alliances; appearance was everything. In some cases, brides had to undress and put on new clothes at the border as they entered their new country, symbolically shedding their foreign identities.”