Wedding colours around the world

Red

In North India a Hindu bride usually wears red or a deep pink, with red sindoor in the parting of her hair after the ceremony. Custom differs across the country. A Bengali bride wears a red Banarasi sari, with white and red bangles. A bride in Kerala may wear cream with a gold border. In Maharashtra, yellow and green are favoured, and Tamil brides often wear a deep red or maroon silk. Chinese brides traditionally wear red embroidered with gold, and Vietnamese brides a red ao dai. Red in all these stands for luck, joy and prosperity.

White

Before the nineteenth century a European bride simply wore her best dress, in any colour. Queen Victoria's white satin and lace at her wedding in 1840 was widely pictured, and white slowly became the fashion for those who could afford a dress worn once. Its link with purity was attached later. The white dress spread around the world in the twentieth century with films and magazines. In Japan a Shinto bride wears the all-white shiromuku, an older and separate tradition, and may change into a brightly coloured kimono afterwards.

Many colours

At a Yoruba wedding in Nigeria the couple wear matching handwoven aso oke, and each family dresses its guests in a chosen cloth and colour, a custom called aso ebi. Ghanaian couples often wear kente in gold, green, red and blue. A Moroccan bride may change through several kaftans of different colours during the celebration. In Korea the mothers of the couple traditionally wear contrasting colours, often pink for the bride's side and blue for the groom's. Many couples today hold two ceremonies, one in white and one in traditional dress.

Colours on this page

Sources and further reading

• Wedding dress on Wikipedia
• JSTOR Daily: A Natural History of the Wedding Dress
• The Conversation: Why do brides wear white?
• BBC Religions: Hinduism, weddings
• Victoria and Albert Museum: Wedding dress