custom, part three
Cufflinks designed by Beth Lambrecht. Photo by Mike Olbinski.
Soon after we shared the news of our engagement with family and friends, my sister started plotting a surprise for us, a surprise that came with a story.
When she died, my grandmother, my father’s mother, left behind a really extraordinary collection of jewelry. My parents were tasked with appraising and dividing it among her children and grandchildren, and I sat at the table, rapt, as they unwrapped, laid out, and photographed every piece. Because she refused to get on an airplane (or maybe just to get some time away from him), my grandfather went on long trips to “exotic” locales without her, and he’d return with unique pieces of jewelry. In the distribution, my mom inherited a few really interesting pieces, including an intricate and dazzling diamond brooch. Because it was truly, truly fabulous, Mom only wore it on very special occasions, like black-tie events or Tuesday sojourns to the grocery store.
When Mom died, my sister inherited that brooch, but she quickly recognized that she and her daughters would never need such a piece, unless they’re summoned for a ball at Buckingham with Her Majesty. She worked with a jeweler to break the original brooch apart to make smaller pieces for her kids, but there were a few small stones left, including eight tiny baguette-cut stones. She imagined cufflinks for my then-fiancé and me, but when she couldn’t decide between silver and gold, my other sister wisely advised her to consult us. That’s when my sister called and explained her plan. When I stopped crying, all I could say was, thank you.
The next time we were in town, we met with a jeweler to look at the stones and settle on a design. I’d been in this shop a hundred times before - my parents were loyal customers to her parents for decades. I accompanied my mom countless times to get a watch fixed or to resize a ring. I also accompanied my dad countless times to pick a birthday present for Mom, an anniversary present for Mom, a Christmas present…he loved doting on my mom through jewelry, but for him it wasn’t all about the glitz and glam. He picked pieces that told a story. For one anniversary, he gave her a ring with ten diamonds, one for each of their children. For another, he picked a gold brooch in the shape of a tree with fifteen or twenty tiny pearls, one for each year since they married.
Though she opened each box with exaggerated exasperation, saying, “Bob - where am I going to wear this? To the grocery store?” She’d self-deprecate a bit more and, highlighting the plain white sneakers she wore most days, say with a smirk, “Do you think they’ll go with my Keds?” Inspired by The Will Rogers Follies, we shared a little laugh every time she opened a box when one of us would sing, “Diamoooonds…for Mis-sus Rogers…” Even after a stroke debilitated him, he sent my sister to the shop, knowing that the jeweler would know exactly what he intended. My mom opened the box, seated in a chair next to his hospital bed, and, fighting back very uncharacteristic-for-her tears, gasped, “Bob - how did you…well, where am I going to wear these?” She might’ve been embarrassed by the extravagance, but she wore them - yes, to the grocery store - with pride.
Crowded around her desk, my sister, my then-fiancé, and I considered her sketches, settled on a design, and looked at the batch of tiny baguettes. Because of the shape of the brooch from which they came, they were all slightly different sizes. I found myself getting misty thinking about that imperfection. At one level, it felt very wabi sabi, purposefully and humbly imperfect. At another, it seemed especially appropriate for a queer couple, a classic accessory with a playful twist. And more, because of the imperfections, the unique source, and the stories they carried, the cufflinks we’d eventually wear could never be replicated.
When we dressed for our wedding and put the links into our cuffs, I was poignantly aware of their history. They took on a kind of sacred status for me - though ordinary jewelry, they were different, distinct from other things on the dresser. It may be too strong to suggest that they’re talismanic or horcruxes, but at the very least they’re first class relics that link multiple generations of my family. When we wore them in our ceremony, we were surrounded by our family and friends and photos of my parents, my sister, and my husband’s father, all of whom died a few years before we married. They became a tangible link to my history and all of the stories, generosity, and relationships they touched.
Maybe I associated attachment to ritual objects with superstitions and outdated sentiment, but in that moment I came to understand the power of material traditions. Had the brooch stayed intact, it would’ve been a lovely but rarely used object. My sister’s generosity and creativity resulted in an innovation that preserved a tradition but also made room for expanding and adapting it.
This month, I’ve been diving into George Monger’s encyclopedic Wedding Customs of the World, which collates information about hundreds of practices that make up wedding traditions. My goal is to consider what the historical origins, development, and contemporary uses of particular customs tell us about their original contexts and about the assumptions they reflect about identity and social relationships, but I’m especially interested in thinking about how these practices hold up today. First, I looked at different ways communities are involved in weddings, and last week, I turned to the white wedding dress. This week, I’m exploring the roles of various accessories and jewelry that, though not as visually prominent in a ceremony, profoundly, if subtly, shape the experience of a wedding ritual and communicate much about the values that are perpetuated, reinforced, or challenged through their use.
Accessories: wedding belts, garters, and crowns. Oh, my.
Beyond the wedding dress, there are other sartorial elements that play an important symbolic and functional role in weddings in multiple cultural contexts. For example, Monger describes the variety of “wedding belt” practices. In ancient Rome, a bride wore a kind of chastity belt which would be undone by her groom before they, um, you know, consummated their union. The belt and its undoing are a transparent metaphor for a woman’s virginity, but, while its sexual connotations go well with other wedding practices, such belts were not used exclusively in this context. The belt held medical and magical qualities and was worn for protection or as a love charm.
The practice spread throughout Europe and the Middle East with aesthetic and cultural variations - one can imagine such a practice traveling with the spread of the Roman Empire and adapting to or absorbing regional customs and layers of interpretation - but its basic form, function, and symbolism remain consistent. In the Turkish iteration, a groom’s family provides a belt of red and white ribbons to the bride. Her father ties it around her waist and instructs “her to ‘keep her waist tight,’ which is a way of telling her to control the couple’s sexual life.” This magnifies the families’ authority in the marriage, and it also clearly puts a woman’s sexuality at the center of the marriage, of the ritual, and of the community. That’s an interesting contrast to Jewish tradition early in the Common Era which included the gift of an ornate sash or girdle from the groom to the bride as a symbol of betrothal (a very different precedent to the engagement ring). The bride reciprocated with a gift of a tallis, or prayer shawl. In later Jewish tradition, a couple exchanged marriage belts as part of an increasingly elaborate series of gifts preceding their marriage. Unlike the Turkish version, the practice seems to intensify the focus on the relationship at the center with mutual, if differing, responsibilities.
We don’t see many marriage belts in contemporary American weddings, but a practice with similar implications (binding a woman’s body until a groom undoes her virginity) survives: the removal of the garter. Today, a bride’s garter is typically an extraneous elastic and ruffled band that sits above the knee to hold up her stockings, but it originated as a bunch of ribbons tied just below the knee. In 17th & 18th century Britain, men would pull ribbons from the bride’s garter to wear in their hats for luck. “Bridal garters,” Monger explains, “were prized as love tokens with magical properties” and distributed as prizes during wedding festivities. In France, one custom included an auction whose highest bidder won the right to remove the bride’s garter. American weddings today sometimes (though decreasingly) include a variation of this practice - it’s been a while, but I witnessed this multiple times as a kid! At one reception, the bride, a close friend of our family, sat on a chair in the middle of the dance floor, and the groom walked around her, postured and joked with guests, and then dramatically fell to one knee, lifted her skirt, and slowly pulled the garter from her leg. He then tossed it to a group of unmarried men waiting for the prize, and the one who caught it, some might believe, was destined to be the next bachelor to marry.
However one spins it, the tying and untying of a wedding belt and the removal of the garter are unquestionably a demonstration of sexual power. While the Jewish practice evolved into something slightly more equitable, historically, there aren’t complementary practices that give women a controlling role. The tradition of tossing of the bouquet, one of the last actions a bride takes before she leaves the reception (and heads to the bridal chamber), doesn’t include her stripping flowers from her groom - even as she tosses the bouquet to a group of unmarried women, she remains in a passive role, quite literally leaving her virginity behind. Throw in a white gown to highlight the connection between virginity and moral purity, and the practice delivers a serious commentary on gender roles that is seriously out of step with modern and postmodern values.
The use of crowns to adorn a marrying couple is a widespread historical practice, too, that continues to frame the couple as “king and queen” for a day. Sometimes, crowns are purely aesthetic, part of an elaborate outfit or headdress, but in Greek weddings, like rings in contemporary American weddings, crowns serve an important ritual function - once donned, a bride and groom become husband and wife. Monger draws a parallel to a practice in Indonesia, a Mingangkabau bride’s horned headdress. Their name (Mingangkabau) itself means ‘victorious buffalo,’ and the bride’s horns evoke those of a buffalo. Bridal headdresses are passed from mothers to their daughters to, as Monger describes, symbolize “the position of women in this matrilineal society where land is held by the women who pass it from mother to daughter.” A few days later, brides don gold crowns to mark their new status, but only after the days of the buffalo headdress which mark her assumption to the matriarchal lineage.
Considering these practices side by side, an important insight about ritual practice in general and about weddings in particular emerges. In the context of a ritual, an ordinary item or action takes on new dimensions. A belt or girdle might be a functional accessory any other day, but on her wedding, it becomes a symbolic distillation of the bride’s role in the wedding and in her ensuing life. A crown projects wealth and authority any other day, but amid wedding festivities it also communicates the transference of power and authority. Because people are paying attention in a different way, precisely how they are juxtaposed and used can perpetuate and reinforce the values baked into those practices and symbols. As societies evolve, weddings provide a space to push back against changes, such as the increasing social power and authority of women, but by juxtaposing things differently, by eliminating or revising those practices, weddings also provide a potent space to innovate and to change the fabric of their broader societies.
Jewelry
“Jewelry at the wedding,” Monger explains, “therefore fulfilled several functions - as a straight ornament, as part of the bride’s dowry, as part of an exchange of gifts to seal the contract, as a way to protect the bride from malignant spirits, and as an indicator of the status of the wearer.” While grooms are sometimes adorned with jewelry for the ceremony or festivities, jewelry is most frequently associated with and more directly pertinent to brides. Monger doesn’t ask why, but it’s hard to avoid the reality that, until very recently, especially in European and North American cultures, men have been the sole inheritors of major generators of wealth, such as land and legal authority, and women’s wealth was limited to material, transportable goods.
In The Constant Princess, Philippa Gregory paints a (mostly fictional) portrait of Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII. When she is set aside by the king and cut off from royal resources, Catherine carefully stewards her own dowry and physical possessions to be able to maintain her household. To pay for food and other essentials, she sells off, piecemeal, silver plates and gold jewelry. It’s just one example of Gregory’s commitment throughout her novels to illuminate the “real life” concerns of historical women and to challenge unquestioned traditions like primogeniture, and it, rather starkly, demonstrates both the purpose of dowries and the fragile position of even the most powerful women in history.
Rings are perhaps the most familiar pieces of jewelry associated with weddings, but what kind of ring and how it was used has varied significantly over time. Roman grooms often sent their brides iron rings ahead of their wedding, and Ancient Greek and Roman rings included inscriptions, a practice that continued into the Renaissance with “posy rings.” Monger also describes “gimmal rings,” interlocking bands that would be broken apart over a bible before witnesses to constitute a betrothal. The rings would be worn by the couple until the wedding, when the rings would be reunited. In late-medieval England, an engagement ring was actually treated as an indicator of the bride’s dowry, a sort of preview to what the bride would bring with her, but rings were also often sent by grooms as gifts to their future brides. In Jewish tradition, rings were so elaborate and ornate that they were unwearable - but they were mostly borrowed for ceremonial use, not worn as a daily indicator of marital status.
Today, we’re accustomed to seeing a wedding or engagement ring on the fourth finger of the left hand, but that’s a modern innovation. Because the left hand was associated with bad luck or worse (for example, Satan), most wedding rings were worn on the right hand. They were worn on the middle finger because, it was thought, it had a direct connection to the heart. Among the religious and social changes that came with the Reformation, Protestants started wearing wedding rings on their left hands to distance themselves from previous practices; today, in predominantly Christian regions that were not dominated by Protestants, wedding rings continue to appear on the right hand. Under the brief period of an abolished monarchy and Puritan rule in England, the use of wedding rings was banned because of their “heathenish origin,” but even after they returned to regular use, people didn’t continuously wear wedding rings until the19th century.
And then there’s the diamond ring, the ultimate symbol of modern romance and marriage. Monger writes:
A separate engagement ring, in the modern sense, given by the prospective groom to his bride-to-be is a fairly recent innovation in the history of marriage, although rings have long been given as love tokens or tokens of a promise to marry. The jewel-encrusted engagement ring was not part of the normal symbol of engagement to marry until a 1938 De Beers advertising campaign to promote the sale of diamonds.
Not so ultimate in this light, eh? Like Queen Victoria marching down the aisle to musical accompaniment in a white dress, De Beers invented a tradition with global ramifications with a marketing campaign. Unlike imitators of Victoria’s dress, though, diamond buyers have a direct and irreversible impact on the planet and on the lives and livelihoods of entire communities of people. This new burst of demand for diamond rings exacerbated the geological and human rights abuses that had already survived from early colonial times, devastating and sometimes enslaving communities throughout Africa. While alternatives have emerged, including lab-grown gems and responsible sourcing methods, the ongoing demand for diamonds continues to fund a largely unethical and unsupervised industry, at the expense of the lives and liberties of entire communities.
Rings are so much more than indicators of marital status. Like all jewelry used in wedding customs, they reveal both the kinds of values and assumptions that get passed on with traditional practices and the possibility of innovation without losing their core purpose and meaning.
