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A Colonial Wedding
THE third girl, with a delight for oldfashioned ways, was followed by six maids in quaint Colonial gowns of plain or flowered silk, no two costumes alike, save for soft white lace fichus. Black velvet neckbands, powdered curls, and "nosegays" of small pink carnations in lace paper holders quite carried out the lovely effect.
The old-fashioned rooms were hung with smilax and asparagus fern, and in every window stood a pot of flowering fuchsias. [164]
One paragraph of costume and greenery, lifted out of a run of wedding descriptions. It is worth knowing what is missing from it before reading what is there.
- This is a fragment of a sequenceThe text begins THE third girl, which means the first and second girls and their weddings are on the preceding pages, and the setting, the ceremony and the guests belong to that earlier account. Nothing here establishes where the wedding was or what happened at it.
- Not one word about the food or the serviceThe entire description is what the bridesmaids wore and what was hung on the walls. In this book that is what wedding planning consisted of, and the eating is dealt with in separate chapters on table decorations and buffet menus.
- Mismatched bridesmaids, one unifying elementNo two costumes alike, save for soft white lace fichus. Six different gowns held together by one repeated detail is advice given as a fresh idea in every wedding magazine since. Here it is a single clause, assumed to be obvious.
- The nosegay in a paper frillA small tight bunch of carnations set into a stiff lace-paper holder, which was a shop item. The modern equivalent is a cuff of ribbon or a collar of lace round a posy, and the effect is the same: the flowers are held in a flat circle rather than allowed to spread.
- Smilax and asparagus fernTwo trailing florist’s greens of the period, grown specifically for roping along walls and over mantels. Asparagus fern is still sold; smilax has very largely gone out of the trade, and anyone reproducing this would rope with eucalyptus or ruscus instead.
- Colonial here means fancy dressThe fichu, the powdered curls and the black velvet neckband are a costumier’s version of early American dress rather than a reconstruction of it, and they were worn by the bridal party at an actual wedding. The theme is the costume, and the book offers it as one option among a dozen.
The wedding described here is staged like a tableau: the party in costume to a scheme, the rooms hung with roped greenery, a flowering plant in every window. The flowers tell you something the text does not. Smilax, asparagus fern and fuchsias in pots are all hothouse goods, bought in and arranged by somebody, which places this at a town wedding with money behind it — a useful contrast with the chapter on summer decorations, which argues that the free woods and fields will do just as well. The book carried both, and expected its readers to recognise which of the two situations they were in.