Weddings: Let’s all get dressed up to the sevens!*

I am at that time in life by which most of my friends are married, and those who remain unmarried are likely, for reasons of social ineptitude or eccentric standards of personal hygiene, to remain so. As a result, weddings have for a couple of years been few and far between. However, in a strange inversion of the norm, Mrs Bumwad and I have recently attended marriages on two consecutive weekends, and a third is imminent (and we were forced to decline attendance at a fourth which took place last month). The last will be a more or less traditional English wedding - church, reception, dancing - but the first two were somewhat sui generis, the first because it was an Anglo-Italian affair held abroad, and, as we all know, when in Rome…; and the second because it was the bride’s second marriage.

The bride and groom

So, although neither was a ‘typical’ occasion – if such could be said to exist – they nonetheless triggered some thoughts on the standards of dress now common at weddings, testing my long-held prejudices in favour of the traditional rig of a morning coat and spongebags. Deep and clear thinking was also occasioned because the prospective groom at Wedding #3 sought my advice, and it occurred to me that here was a useful way of clarifying my own thoughts before passing on the results. However, on writing, I found that my thoughts were more complex than I realised, so for purposes of clarity I have broken the posts into four bits. The first consists of some general observations about the relationship between the nature of ‘a wedding’ and the way we ought to dress if attending one; the subsequent posts will consider these two specific occasions; and the final one will try to summarise the few ideas discussed.

Needless to say the posts proceed on the assumption that the reader actually gives a shit about how they appear before fellow guests and does not regard the rite of marriage, the attendant legal obligations and the invitation to a sacred form of table commensality merely as an excuse for a free piss-up and the prospect of tapping into an as-yet unexplored sector of the opposite sex courtesy of the union before God of a friend with a hitherto-unknown other. A dangerous assumption, possibly. A wedding is all too frequently yet another of those occasions on which it is depressingly obvious that the ladies have spent some time and effort not only considering what they will wear but also upon assembling and assuming their appearance – in short, to have made considerable effort, even if with mixed results, to acknowledge the importance of the occasion. Yet to observe the appearance of most gentlemen guests is to observe a faithful recreation of the demeanour and attire of an eight-year old boy forced to attend a church garden party while Batman is on. Which is possibly to say that, to many if not most people, a wedding is a party with a boring bit attached – like graduation – and the requirement to acknowledge that the occasion has any more important social function or purpose is entirely optional, if not faintly contemptible; and different - 'better' - standards of dress are no more necessary than are different standards of conduct.


The boring bit.


The good bit.

My limited enquiries into the matter lead me to conclude that, for most people, weddings are pretty much the last sort of gathering in which any form of dress ‘code’ is observed. Or perhaps we might put it another way and remark that weddings are the only occasion on which many people will tolerate being told what they are expected to wear. Nonetheless even here we are increasingly vulnerable to the sort of confusion that is almost invariably the result when rules once instinctively understood and observed are adulterated: a wedding is yet another occasion which proves the paradox that ‘laws make you free’, and that the erosion of a commonly-accepted convention serves not to liberate but to oppress.

I always used to think it slightly pointless when invitations – not just to weddings – specified dress codes. Once it would have been as utterly superfluous to state ‘morning dress’ on a wedding invitation as it would have been to write ‘wear socks’, ‘shave’ or ‘please do not piss in the font’. Consequently invitations were confined to a simple statement of the date, time and place of the marriage ceremony, and an address to which to reply: no direction on order of dress was required, because it was taken for granted that gentlemen would wear morning dress, the appropriate uniform, or a national equivalent. These days, however, when it often seems that the only reluctant concession to the solemnity of the occasion even by the groom is that he was worn his favourite t-shirt and cleanest ‘trainers’, no such assumptions can be made; yet too often one turns to the invitation for guidance only to emerge from the experience wholly unsatisfied.

The best man's speech.

Strangely, whereas invitations commonly omit any sort of guidance on dress, it is now quite normal for them to be accompanied by several pages of notes, typically run off on the office laser printer, folded and stuffed into the envelopes along with the double-folded copperplate cards so that in size and weight they resemble nothing so much as the laminated ceramic ballistic plates inserted in the front of body armour. These specify in elaborate, and often illustrated, detail the location of the church and any reception venue, the addresses and telephone numbers of local hotels, taxi companies, ayurvedic yoghurt analysts and child nutritionists, as well as the timings of the local farmers’ markets and queue lengths for the rides on the local theme parks. This is all very well-intentioned, no doubt, but the level of detail these ‘admin instructions’ provide has expanded in proportion - and consequently their usefulness has declined in inverse proportion - to the availability of the information they contain. After all, the ability to find and book a hotel and a taxi, even in some far-flung outpost of empire like Carshalton Beeches, ought, particularly in ‘the information age’, to be the sort of implied task the achievement of which is a scarcely laudable mark of adulthood.


Fall WEISSE HOCHZEIT DTG 29 Oct 2010: Detailed location of church, Reception (the Swan and Asbo), Relate office and holding cells 

And the one bit of information that is not readily available on the internet and is unlikely to be uncovered by intuition is what the bride would like her guests to wear.

Now, sometimes it is possible to deduce it with a degree of confidence from marginal information – for example, an assumption that ladies will wear hats is a good indication that men are expected to wear morning dress. Yet too often any further inquiries will reveal only the breezy exhortation to ‘wear what you like!’ This is no doubt intended to be both a helpful liberation from the burdens of expectation and conformity that so blighted our grandparents’ lives, while simultaneously announcing the lack of pretension – and therefore the suitably non-judgemental outlook – of the hosts or prospective spouses. This is of no help at all, as it forces one into the sartorial equivalent of Keynes’s beauty contest: you have to do not what you believe is correct, but what you think everyone else – or at least the bride and her parents – thinks is correct.

(I observe as an aside that, while couples or parents are reluctant to give clear direction on dress for fear of being thought too ‘uptight’ or authoritarian, they are only too happy to be highly prescriptive when it comes to gift lists – or, indeed, the increasingly common and massively self-indulgent requests for donations to charity in lieu of presents, which betray an almost perfectly wrong-headed understanding of the purpose of presents...)

This inverts the natural order of such things, in which it is not what *I* think or like that is at the heart of my attendance, but what the bride and her family would like. It is therefore in a small way an abrogation of responsibility, however laudable in its intent to avoid excessive formality. Cleary there is a balance to be struck, and I do not wish to imply that 'mere' appearances are of central importance on such a day, but it remains possible that if the couple have given no serious thought to the way they wish their guests to conduct themselves, it is possible that they have not given full consideration to the nature of the contract they are entering. To stipulate a different sort of dress for a wedding is not to privilege appearance over substance – to champion ‘dressing up’ for the sake of ‘dressing up’ – nor is it to be a ‘Bridezilla’, but simply to ask one’s family and friends to acknowledge in outward form the essential truths that a wedding represents - even if the precise doctrinal nature of the marriage is not shared by all one’s guests.

Now, if, having reflected on the matter, the bride et al sincerely want their friends to dress only for comfort, or as they would for a day in the office or a court appearance, then that is all well and good, particularly if this is in tune with the overall plan for the day – modest church service, a few friends and family for a fork buffet at local pub, cash bar, disco. But for many weddings – the average cost of a wedding in Great Britain is over £21K, FFS! – a failure to ‘dress up’ to the occasion is to risk undermining what should be a serious – if not actually sacred – undertaking, and is to risk your friends and family treating your ‘big day’ with all the dignity and joy that they would the office Christmas party.

In those circumstances, one faces the dilemma: does one ‘dress up’, and risk looking like you’re trying to upstage ‘the wedding party’, or worse still, that you are not living life to the max? Or does one err on the side of the ‘democratic’, and embrace the ‘informal’, the ‘modern’, entering into the Zeitgeist of our bright modern Britain, in which to be seen to uphold any vestige of old-fashioned standards is one of the last secular sins, along with racism, homophobia? After all, dressing smartly is what the Victorians did, and we all know what a bunch of intolerant, oppressive hypocrites they were [sic omnia]. Indeed, runs the unspoken logic, presenting an outwardly smart and dignified appearance serves only to amplify the fallen human condition and is itself an act of pure hypocrisy. Oh yeah - you might look fine and grand, but we all know you just looked at that woman's tits, and you're trying to get another look, only without making it look like you're looking at them. You sit there in your clean shoes, with only your braces keeping your trousers up, a seething mass of base urges barely constrained by your collar studs and waistcoat... Oi oi, while you're down there, love..! Heh heh heh..! Mine's a lager. Heh heh heh!


You think you're so smart in your top hat...

So we flail around to find some kind of compromise that acknowledges that we have made an effort but without looking like we have made too much of an effort. We find, in short, ‘the middle way’. So, instead of getting dressed up to the nines, we get dressed up to the sevens.


The middle way (centre)

And there will probably be someone who goes for the fives (or fours), possibly because they really don’t know any better, maybe because they genuinely don’t care, but equally possibly as an expression of disregard if not contempt for conventions because their own comfort and sensibilities – and not the bride’s – are their arbiters. And woe betide anyone who miscalculates and goes for the eights (or, God forbid, the nines) as they will in many circumstances feel far more conspicuous than the t-shirt-clad, multiply-pierced colleague, and will have to pay for dry-cleaning and re-starching to boot.

The ushers

But this is another example of the wedge of apathy managing to insert its thinnest edge into proceedings: once you concede that morning dress is ‘too stuffy’, there is no logically defensible ‘backstop’. If not morning coats, why ‘lounge suits’? Why ties? Why, indeed, socks? Why, we might reasonably, if exasperatedly, ask, bother at all? Surely it is enough just to be there for my friends, and if that means I am ‘there’ in my underpants and slippers, so what? Get a life, you anally-retentive twat.

Why bother?

Except, I hope I need hardly add, that by disregarding the conventions that others have observed you would not really ‘be there’ at all.

To exceed the remit of this blog, it seems to me that this reluctance to give clear direction on what is expected even on a matter as outwardly trivial as dress represents a further example of the erosion of the moral courage of the middle classes.

So again I find I have written a post which reinforces that I favour a more conservative approach as a principle, as well as voicing one or two peevish cavils at what is, my own wedding excepted, effectively none of my business. In the next two posts I will examine the two October weddings, as each presented unique challenges from which I hope, in some kind of summary post, to draw some general principles.

* Hat-tip: Boni

UPDATE: I suppose what I'm saying is that these days it is increasingly acceptable for adults to behave like children; so if, by some quirk of good upbringing you have managed to preserve your sense of decorum in the face of the mediocrity of modern life, and actually *do* give a shit about how your marriage is conducted, it's wise to err on the side of caution and give all your guests the sort of clear instructions you might to a child, hoping that it is for most superfluous. And if some of them still insist on dressing like an extra from Skins, at least you can make a mental note never to have them in your house.