From Grace Kelly to Lady Di: the wedding dresses that made history

Barcelona Bridal Fashion Week, the most important showcase of bridal fashion in all of Europe, took place between Thursday and Saturday. It ended up dominating many other cultures, even pushing aside traditional dresses such as kimonos, tunics, and saris. It was the first to opt for the color white, which has since become the standard symbol of the sexual purity required of the bride (and not the groom). It was dressed in pink and white checks. Marilyn Monroe married Joe DiMaggio in the unusual color brown, and Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom the Duke of Windsor abdicated the throne, said "I do" in 1937 in a simple blue dress.

Grace Kelly, upon marrying Rainier III, far from rebelling against tradition, embraced it with one of the most spectacular gowns in history. With the gown, she paid the price to terminate her contract with MGM. Instead of Edith Head, her favorite designer and also chief designer at Paramount and Universal, she had to accept MGM's contract as a condition for breaking her professional commitment. Hollywood has given us multiple bridal icons, such as the Adrian wedding gown that Joan Crawford wore in the film Letty Lynton (1932). Her prominent, ruffled shoulders became a symbol of feminine strength that helped launch Crawford's career and made her a style icon. Macy's department store sold more than half a million copies of that wedding dress in the six months following the film's release.

The countercultural and feminist vibes of the 1960s led many brides to question the tradition of this dress and the stereotype of traditional femininity it represents. Such was the case of Yoko Ono, who married John Lennon in 1969 wearing a miniskirt, a hat, sunglasses, knee-high socks, and sneakers. Bianca Jagger wore a Yves Saint Laurent suit and trousers when she married Mick Jagger in 1971. A miniskirt embodied youth revolts and the sexual revolution, and feminine trousers represented the struggle for equality between men and women.

But if there's one dress that's hard to forget (and digest), it's the one worn by Diana of Wales when she married Prince Charles in 1981, designed by Emmanuel Macron. A true textile meringue that visually engulfed Lady Di, a prelude to the disastrous marriage that awaited her. Designers of the time spent a lot of time making replicas of that dress, in front of crowds of customers who, upon entering their stores, already had a photograph of Diana in their hands. This maximalism made a return to minimalist order when Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy married John F. Kennedy Jr. Her lingerie-style dress set the 90s bridal trend.

The highlight of Barcelona Bridal Fashion Week was the fashion show by one of the heavyweights of the fashion industry, the Vivienne Westwood house, also responsible for iconic dresses such as the one for Carrie Bradshaw's wedding in Sex and the City (2008). It's surprising that a designer so faithful to punk anarchism should excel at creating outfits for one of the most conservative rites of passage. But on the other hand, it shows that weddings, more than a sacrament, are now nothing more than a simple business and another expression of the excessive consumerist society that governs us.