The earliest recorded demonstration of a white wedding dress in Western culture is the English Princess Philippa at her wedding to the Scandinavian King Eric in 1406. She was dressed up 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, even though white would be a color of mourning for French Queens at that time. For the next few centuries, white remained a well-known but in no way obligatory color for royal weddings (Princess Charlotte, when she married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld in 1816, wore an empire-waisted dress in metallic silver lamé). White dresses didn't symbolize virginity as well as purity but instead were costlier and harder to help keep clean, and therefore communicated the status and insightful the wearer.

Up before the middle of the nineteenth century, no woman, not really royalty, likely to wear her wedding gown only once after which never again—an concept that would have been absurd even for the rich prior to the industrial revolution. Even Queen Victoria repurposed her own wedding gown and veil for subsequent use. If a non-royal woman did possess a new dress made specifically for her wedding, it had been likely to become her new Sunday best, either out of the box or in an altered or dyed state, until she wore it or the fashions changed past the powers of alteration. More often than not, a lady got married in the best dress she already owned.

All of this would change for Western brides following the marriage of Queen Victoria and also the industrial revolution, thanks mainly to a few new technological advances, especially photography and also the spread of illustrated magazines.