Howe Enterprise.com
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June 1, 2020
Learn about your antiques and collectibles with Georgia Caraway
"With a united effort we can make the place in which we live clean, wholesome, attractive. We can make the crowded city dweller homesick to come back to us and real living. We can bring new life, new business, new beauty, to the little towns." - Mame Roberts
Georgia Caraway Let's continue celebrating June with weddings and brides and grooms. The color scheme of white for the traditional wedding gown has reportedly more to do with Victorian ideas of virgins and weddings and purity. However, for most of history, Western brides did not wear white. In ancient Rome, 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. Greek brides wore light reddish robes, cinched at the waist by a girdle that the groom was meant to loosen later, symbolizing the loss of her virginity. Chinese brides wore black with red trim. 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. The earliest recorded instance of a white
wedding dress in Western culture is that of the English Princess Philippa at her wedding to the Scandinavian King Eric in 1406. She was dressed in a white tunic lined with ermine and squirrel fur. In 1558, Mary Queen of Scots wore white during her wedding to the soon-to-be King of France. When Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, she wore an opulent pale dress festooned with orange flower blossoms --but the dress was really more of an ivory, or a light pink— champagne, by modern standards. Indeed, the British people so romanticized the relationship between Victoria and her prince consort, who were thought to embody an ideal of domestic bliss, that young women sought to copy her wedding costume in any way they could. 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. For the next few centuries, white remained a popular, but by no means obligatory, color for royal weddings. White dresses did not symbolize virginity or even purity, but rather were costlier and harder to keep clean, and thus communicated the status and wealth of the wearer.
Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, no woman, not even royalty, expected to wear her wedding dress only once and then never again—an idea that would have been absurd even for the very rich before the industrial revolution. Even Queen Victoria repurposed her own wedding dress and veil for subsequent use. If a non-royal woman did have a new dress made especially for her wedding, it was likely to become her new Sunday best, either as is or in an altered or dyed state, until she wore it out or the fashions changed beyond the powers of alteration. All of this would change for Western brides after the marriage of Queen Victoria and the industrial revolution, thanks in large part to a few new technological advances, most notably photography and the spread of illustrated magazines. With the rise of photography, and of wedding portraits in particular, white dresses looked good and stood out in the sometimes muddy-looking new black-and-white or sepia-toned photographic portraits. They looked distinct and provided a good background against which to showcase the beauty of the bride. By 1849, women’s magazines were already proclaiming that not only was white the best color
for a wedding dress, but that it had in fact always been the best and most appropriate choice. Godey's Ladies Magazine reported that "white symbolized the purity and innocence of girlhood, and the unsullied heart she now yields to the chosen one.” Victorian ideals of weddings, romantic love, and purity were projected backwards to rewrite the white dress as a symbol of innocence and virginity rather than wealth. The meaning of marriage, and what we expect from it, has changed drastically in the past two hundred years. Though many people still associate the occasion with a woman in a white dress, more than that, we have come to expect our spouses to fill a myriad of roles once occupied by family members, friends, extramarital lovers, and religion, including being a part of a social partnership, providing intellectual stimulation, and emotional support. We have a couple of wedding gowns, in white of course, in stock in Howe Mercantile. And lots of vintage wedding portraits. Howe Mercantile is NOW OPEN for business from Thursday through Saturday from 11 am - 7 pm. Please wear a mask and gloves to protect yourselves and others. We will be excited to see you!
Elton (Continued from page 7)
what we did. I cannot imagine being in his situation if the roles were reversed. The stress led to even more frequent seizures. One moment at basketball practice in that old gym on the west end of the court on the north sideline about even with the free throw line is that moment which is burned into my memory. Elton had one of his worst sei-
zures I had seen, and the back of his head kept slamming against the floor until Mr. Skipworth sprinted over to him and held his head off the ground. The stoic, soft-spoken, and seemingly emotionless Mr. Skipworth had tears running down his face which was much more than I could take as a 13year-old. As Elton’s seizures grew closer and clos-
er, the boy who lived in Glenbrook Apartments in Howe, his family thought it was best to move him back to Sherman. I never saw Elton again and he died in 2000. But Elton will always live on with me. He was the sweetest boy
and never spoke ill of anyone and was probably the most AllAmerican boy of any of us in that class. I think often of Elton, and I’ll always be able to see his smiling face.
