I wouldn't rely on the author's credentials, whether impressive or not,
but on the information in the book itself, which is what counts.
That said, "brides wore their best dress" is a shorthand comment used
for many historic periods. It conveys that wedding dresses in periods
before 1920 or so did not follow a common modern custom of buying an
expensive dress in a style not wearable for anyone but a bride. As far
as I know, there is a very long-standing custom of people who could
afford to do so buying new clothes for weddings, and comparatively
expensive and fashionable ones for their social station, rather than
being married in clothes they already had, even "best" clothes. It's
just that the new clothes were in a style they could wear after the
wedding.
I also don't know that any one color was in long-standing fashion before
the Victorian and later custom of wearing white. Note that before
overall dry cleaning, white silks were status fabrics because they
became grubby quickly and were hard to clean, though they could be dyed.
Fran
Lavolta Press
Books on historic clothing
www.lavoltapress.com
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