May. 20, 2024
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Court dress with long train. Portugal, c.1845.
In clothing, a train describes the long back portion of a robe, coat, cloak, skirt, overskirt, or dress that trails behind the wearer.
It is a common part of ceremonial robes in academic dress, court dress or court uniform. It is also a common part of a woman's formal evening gowns or wedding dresses.
Dress with a fishtail train, French, c. 1880. LACMA
Detail of the previous dress
Trains in modern (20th and 21st century) bridal wear have their own terminology:
Brides of the Ndebele people of South Africa traditionally wear long beaded trains hung from the shoulder, known as nyoga (snake).[7]
Trains are a common feature of the Royal mantles of Kings and Princes, as well as the mantles of many chivalric orders.
Officers of older, traditional universities generally wear distinctive and more elaborate dress. The Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor may wear a black damask lay type gown with a long train.[8][9][10] In France the train is now usually hooked to the inner side of the robe.
The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, when robed, dresses like a High Court Judge with the distinction of a train to his scarlet robe.[11]
Judges of the Court of Appeal wear the black silk damask gown, trained and heavily embellished with gold embroidery.
French court dress includes a train, now buttoned to the inside of the robe and suspended by fabric bands, a vestige of the former practice of lawyers carrying their trains.[12]
The Lord Chancellor, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and other high dignitaries also wear similar embroidered black robes with trains.[13]
The Lord Mayor of London also wears a robe with a train.[14]
A trained robe, the cappa magna (great cape) remains in use in the Catholic Church for certain ceremonial occasions. Cardinals, bishops, and certain other honorary prelates are entitled to wear the cappa magna, but within the territory of their jurisdiction.[15]
Eastern Orthodox bishops also traditionally use a cloak with a long train known as the Mandyas, which may have parallels with the development of the Catholic cappa magna.
Japanese court attire with train
For male peers, the Coronation robe is a cloak of crimson velvet extending to the feet, open in the front (with white silk satin ribbon ties) with train trailing behind.[16] The Parliament robe of a British peer is a full-length garment of scarlet wool with a collar of white miniver fur, cut long as a train, but this is usually kept hooked up inside the garment.[17]
Court dresses for women were commonly fifteen yards in length.[2] Court dresses for noble women sometimes had trains both behind and in front of the dress.[4]
Japanese Imperial court clothing, sokutai for men and jūnihitoe for women, both include a long train extending from the back of the robe. It remains in use with the Imperial Household of Japan for ceremonial occasions.[18]
Cartoon showing how trailing skirts can transmit diseases. Published in Puck, August 8, 1900.
Trains declined in popularity in the late nineteenth century when they were targeted by public health campaigns in Europe and the United States that argued they brought germs from the streets into the wearers' homes. The issue was the subject of a cartoon published in Puck in 1900 entitled "The Trailing Skirt: Death Loves a Shining Mark."[19]
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The history of the wedding dress is shorter than the history of weddings, and even shorter still than the history of marriage. An ancient Chinese myth contains one of the oldest known references to such a garment, and it goes something like this:
Once upon a time, in a green and misty country at the center of the world, there lived a clever dog who was also a dragon. Naturally, he was unmarried. This dragon-dog, named Panhu, was the servant of an emperor, who was at war with a fractious general. One day, the emperor proclaimed that any man who could bring him the head of his enemy would be given the hand of his daughter in marriage.
Panhu was not a man, but being loyal and courageous he promised to become one upon vanquishing the enemy so he could marry the princess. He succeeded, changed into human form, and was engaged to the emperor’s daughter. To make sure that the union was a lucky one, the empress dressed the princess in a beautiful phoenix dress and phoenix crown, and Panhu carried his bride off to live in the southern mountains. They were happy and had many children. When it came time for their own daughter to marry, a real phoenix flew out of a mountain and presented the girl with a colorful phoenix dress all her own.
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Nowadays, whether we are referring to the voluminous white confections found in Western bridal magazines or the sleek red phoenix dresses with mythical roots that are still worn by brides in China today, the wedding dress has become its own kind of talisman. We tend to focus on color, with white being the preferred choice for brides in the West, from Norway to Argentina, and red being the more appropriate color for traditional Eastern brides, be they from South Sudan or Singapore. We ascribe meaning to these color choices, as if white could only suggest purity and new beginnings, while red could only signify life, luck, and celebration. But this has not always been the case, and the wedding dresses we hail as “traditional” are, for the most part, relatively modern, no matter where they come from.
Unlike swans, ospreys, coyotes, and termites, the primates known as Homo sapiens do not generally mate for life. While some of us naked apes may find one partner and stay with them forever, never straying, history tells us that it has not been the norm for our species. Nevertheless, marriage, a social technology, has sprung up in most societies and on every inhabited continent.
For the majority of its existence, marriage has been a worldly matter, having to do with the transfer of property, the creation and support of children, the tracking of bloodlines, and the control of women. For these reasons, it was usually a man-woman affair, regardless of a society’s feelings toward homosexuality. But although there have been marriages throughout most of human civilization, this does not mean that there were weddings. There are, for example, no wedding ceremonies involving an exchange of vows in the Bible. Marriages were made official through the signing of a contract or some other means of formalized agreement, but a marriage was not generally considered to be a spiritual or even romantic occasion. And because there were no weddings, for a long time there could be no true wedding dresses, either.
While the peoples of ancient Sumer, Babylon, and Assyria celebrated romantic and erotic love in art and poetry, the question of marriage was far more transactional. Herodotus’s Histories tell of the Babylonian marriage market, where each year the marriageable young girls were brought before a crowd of men who bid for them, like slaves, based on their beauty. The “most beautiful” were chosen as wives for the wealthy, while the “ugliest” women who did not sell were given away to commoners along with monetary compensation for their upkeep, like problematic farm animals.
One can surmise that the women of Babylon’s marriage market were expected to look market-ready, so as to fetch the highest possible price (as well as, presumably, be sold into the most comfortable circumstances). Herodotus does not say what these women wore, but it’s likely that someone tried to make sure they looked their best, like apples shined up for display in the apple cart.
In 1875 the British artist Edwin Long painted an interpretation of the scene, based on Herodotus’s description as well as imagery from Assyrian artifacts. All the potential brides in Long’s painting wear draped garments in cream or white, while the men bidding for them wear a mix of darker hues. But this color scheme has more to do with Victorian ideas of virgins and weddings and purity—associations that almost certainly did not exist in the ancient world—than any real historical precedent. Still, at certain times and in certain places, ideas about the kind of beauty or virtue that a new bride should possess have snagged on a story, a myth, a part of culture, or a famous marriage, and traditions and superstitions have precipitated. Over time, these precipitations have calcified into ceremony.
For most of history, even Western brides did not wear white.
For most of history, even Western brides did not wear white. In ancient Rome, where marriages were celebrated with parties and banquets—an important social event, if not a sacrament—brides wore long veils of deep yellow over a complicated six-part braided hairstyle. The yellow veil was described as being “the color of flame,” and thus the brides themselves were like torches, bringing light and warmth to their new husbands’ homes.
Ancient Athenian brides wore long violet or light reddish robes, cinched at the waist by a girdle that the groom was meant to loosen later, symbolizing the loss of her virginity. The marriage was made official by a feast, followed by a torch-lit procession that ferried the couple to the bridal chamber. Upon entering, an Athenian bride was given a quince fruit to bite into, like Persephone tasting the pomegranate seeds from the underworld orchards that bound her to her new husband, Hades.
A key theme of weddings is the symbolic passage from childhood to adulthood, from one distinct stage of life to the next. This is especially true for women, who pass from the virginal, springtime realm of girlhood into the fruitful maturity of married life, where they will be expected to produce children. In many cultures, the rite that jettisons young women into a new world of sex and motherhood is played out as a kind of death of her old self, complete with ritualized grieving and formal lamentations. At times, the clothes that brides wear have reflected these themes.
China may be the first place where brides were expected to wear a particular color. During the reign of the Zhou Dynasty some three thousand years ago, brides and their bridegrooms both donned sober black robes with red trim, worn over a visible white undergarment. The wearing of specific colors and designs was not reserved for weddings. Zhou rulers instituted strict clothing laws that dictated what could be worn, by whom, and when, based on profession, social caste, gender, and occasion. These rules were still in effect by the start of the Han Dynasty, around 200 B.C., when brides and bridegrooms still both wore black. The Hans were purportedly less strict in enforcing clothing edicts, but nevertheless prescribed that certain colors be worn at certain times of the year: green in spring, red in summer, yellow in autumn, and black in winter.
By the seventh century, during the reign of the Tang Dynasty, with clothing edicts further loosened, it became fashionable for brides to wear green to their weddings—perhaps as a nod to the springtime clothing of the previous Han period—while their bridegrooms typically wore red. A more relaxed social order led to more diverse and experimental fashions, with women wearing short dresses and even traditional menswear in their daily lives. The Tang Dynasty ruled during a period of much immigration and cultural influence that flowed from China to both Japan and the Korean peninsula, and the fashion influences from the Tang period can still be seen in some traditional Japanese and Korean bridal fashions today, both in color and in form.
In Japan, a bride often wears several kimonos of different colors throughout her wedding day. A Japanese Shinto bride wears white. Beginning in the fourteenth century, Korean silk wedding robes were red, green, and yellow. Much like Zhou- and Han-ruled China, traditional Korean fashions were also strictly regulated by color. Children and unmarried adults in Imperial Korea wore bright hues, whereas after marriage, men and women of this period both wore white or other neutrals until their old age. The very elderly wore white only, a color of mourning, and everyone was required to wear white for three years after the death of an emperor or a member of his family.
Traditional Korean brides were also expected to embody a common theme in bridal fashion throughout the world, which is the emulation of royalty. This is, in part, how Western brides came to wear white as well, and in turn, how a particular kind of white Western wedding dress began to colonize the weddings of the whole world.
A wedding dress for a first marriage in Europe and European-dominant countries is now usually white by default, and any woman getting married in another color does so as a deviation. But the ubiquity of this style is relatively recent, becoming de rigeur only by the middle of the nineteenth century, when Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840. Before that, although brides did wear white when they could afford it, even the wealthiest and most royal among them also wore gold, or blue, or, if they were not rich or royal, whatever color their best dress happened to be.
The earliest recorded instance of a white wedding dress in Western culture is that
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