By Pauline Weston Thomas for Fashion-Era.com
Mid 1980s Wedding Dresses Photos of Real People at 1984 Wedding
- Gary and His Bride
- Helen's 1984 White Wedding Dress Second Time Around
- Typical 1984 Wedding Dress Pattern
- Dynasty Influence
- Paula Cody
- Other Memorable Events of 1984
- Celebrity Weddings of the Year - 1984
- Mother of the Bride Outfits
Gary and His Bride - 1980s Wedding Dress
This wedding was of Gary and his bride. The wedding took place in Hong Kong. The bride's 1984 wedding dress had a sweetheart bodice and a semi sheer neckline filler with lace decoration, culminating in a small lace stand neckline. The bodice style is very similar to that of the wedding gown worn by Helen below.
Helen's 1984 White Wedding Dress Second Time Around
You may remember this bride from her wedding in 1953. Helen was widowed after 20 years and was single again for 10 years before marrying her second husband Max.
At her first wedding Helen wore a beautiful grey satin cocktail dress or what some might think of as a prom dress.
30 years later when she married again at her 1984 wedding in America, Helen opted for the full white wedding dress she did not have the first time around.
She wrote to me, 'My second wedding dress was dark ivory with a lace bodice and featured a chapel length train. It was made of a very fine almost sheer cotton type material...'
The material Helen is probably describing might have been a cotton and Dacron (polyester) mixed fibre fabric which was very popular for wedding wear in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The fabric can be made to appear almost sheer and can drape softly. The fabric mixture has the look of sheer cotton lawns, but is lighter in weight and does not crease as badly as pure muslin-type fabrics can.
These 1980's wedding dress photos must not be published/used elsewhere - © Copyright www.fashion-era.com 2023
Typical 1984 Wedding Dress Pattern
The weddings on this page all show women wearing wedding dresses with high or stand collar necklines, although low necklines were also a look of the era.
The lower neckline was getting a little tired since the mass popularity of the style after the wedding of Princess Diana in 1981.
The first three brides wear wedding dresses with a semi sheer lace upper bodice.
Mandarin and high stand collars were a popular wedding neckline after the many square necklines of the 1970s.
Decorum was back in fashion especially in bridal wear. 'V' Yokes with extra flounces of chiffon, sometimes of several layers, had been fashionable since the mid 1970s. 10 years on the yokes had become curved.
Another feature of 1980s wedding dresses was the big sleeves, which reached massive puffed fullness. Big to elbow puffed sleeves were made popular after the wedding of Princess Diana, although most of the brides (below) on this web page have chosen slimmer sleeves than those shown in this typical dress pattern right of 1984/5.
Dynasty Influence
All of the 1980's wedding dresses on this page feature lace and are high-necked. Another wedding of 1984, also in America, was sent to me by Shannon a relative of this bride called Jill.
Jill's dress looks a very typical wedding dress of 1984. The wedding dress style and hairstyle show influences from the TV serial Dynasty. The shoulders are widening and the bodice is rich with decorative detail.
The sleeves are slightly puffed at the head and you can just make out some inner shoulder support for the extended sleeve head. Such sleeves often had a been supportive net.
Jill's hair is very typical of the tumbling hairstyles of the era and the contrasting short hair of the women sitting is also very representative of 1980s hair with a slight punk-lifted effect.
You can read more about the 1980s shoulders in power dressing.
Paula Cody - 1984 Wedding Dress
Finally, Paula wears a high-necked Edwardian-style wedding gown made from antique silk and old lace from her mother's attic.
The sleeves are similar in style to that of the wedding dress in the photo above. The fussy features of frilling were very popular after the lead set by the New Romantics and the resultant fancy blouse fashions of the 1980s.
The little flower girls all wear yoked style dresses in poly cotton lawns.
Paula's great grandfather was Samuel Franklin Cody of Farnborough was famous for flying old planes. I recall her father, who gave her away, was the spitting image of all the pictures you see of S.F. Cody.
The silk used to make the wedding dress was actually a narrow bolt of old natural silk that might have once been from the same silk batch used in one of S. F. Cody's flying experiments. It must have been very high-quality silk initially for his kite and flying experiments. The silk was still good to sew with some 70 years after Samuel Cody's death.
Celebrity Weddings of the Year - 1984
- Elton John married Renate Blauel in 1984.
Other Memorable Events of 1984
- The term 'cyberspace' is coined William Gibson's novel Neuromancer.
- TV footage of the famine in Ethiopia shocks world as 6 million face brink of death.
- Bob Geldof and Band Aid release 'Do They Know It's Christmas' for famine relief.
- Apple Computer releases the Macintosh personal computer with now famous TV advert.
- Reagan re-elected as USA president in landslide election
- Portable compact disc player introduced and set to replace tapes
- Chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, December 3rd.
- Stonewashed jeans developed.
- The AIDS virus recognised.
1984 - The Book by George Orwell
In 1949 the George Orwell book called 1984 was published. 1984 is a book about an imaginary future where every aspect of life including an individual’s thoughts is under totalitarian state control.
The totalitarian state is known as Oceania with a dictator called Big Brother. The story revolves around the thought police surveillance that Big Brother operates within Oceania to stop people like the main character Winston from having their own thoughts and non-dictated lives.
Use of closed circuit cameras today recording our every move, the monitoring of emails and the nanny state forbidding simple activities, is the modern parallel with the concept of ‘Big Brother’ watching over our every move.
1986 Wedding of Jacquie
Jacquie was married in 1986 when power dressing was all the rage, a fashion that lasted until the early 1990s.
Jacquie wanted a classic, yet modest wedding dress style. She lived in Hong Kong at the time and thus was able to acquire beautiful quality silk fabric. Jacquie asked an old friend Pat to make the wedding gown so she could have exactly the dress style she wanted.
It is interesting that there are no extremes of oversized shoulder dressing in this wedding picture and so this old wedding photo has a very classic feel to it, as a result, it does not scream 1980s, when we admire the bridal group 20+ years later.
1986 Wedding - Karen's Backless Dress
By contrast, Karen chose to wear a very daring wedding dress for the time, with a low cowl back. One famous man divorced his equally celebrity famous new wife for wearing a low-backed wedding dress.
Celebrity chef Marco Pierre White was not amused by the back-revealing dress his first wife wore to their wedding ceremony.
But a woman should wear whatever she feels is best for her. She should choose the wedding dress that makes her feel the most comfortable and the most attractive on her special day. If a man dictates what a woman wears on her wedding day what hope is there for an equal partnership?
Today of course, compared to the volume of flesh most brides expose in their bustier dresses, back, arms, and breasts, Karen's dress would be considered very tame. Karen chose this style because she was petite and her back was a good feature. It also of course provided back interest to the congregation during the ceremony.
In reality, the wedding dress exposed much more flesh than the picture shows because the cowl's back was loose and open. As a guest at this wedding, I know it was possible to see the complete spinal column which gave a definite air of undress and erred on the side of overexposure in a church setting.
As you can see it was also a very windy wedding day, which always makes it worthwhile considering alternative venues to the church for the wedding pictures. Realising on the actual day that a shower or windy weather means taking the images inside the church, may throw you in a way that upsets your day. Railings in your photos are not really the look you expect to see.
It is worth taking a digital camera along to the church and venue weeks before and taking a few shots beforehand to plan where the main photos might be best for the photographer. Fortunately, Karen had a good wedding video taken and it was possible to select extra prints from that video.
You can see elements of 1980s fashion styling in this dress in the sleeves and shoulder line. Nosegays were revived in the 1980s for bridesmaids.
Popular colors for bridesmaid nosegay sprays were often peach. Brides still used shower and trail flower sprays, but more natural loose straw or ribbon-tied arrangements became fashionable in the 1990s, especially by the late 1990s.
Popular bridal fabric colors in the 1980s included white, ivory, cream or a very soft hint of champagne or the palest pale magnolia pink. These creamy tones all followed the wedding fashion trend set by Princess Diana at her wedding in 1981 and perpetuated by Sarah Ferguson right in 1986.
During the 1980s it became more usual to have bridesmaids and flower girls in the color and exact fabric the bride wore. Usually, the bridesmaid's dresses were stylistically correct mini versions of the wedding dress itself. By the 1990s, wedding dress designers started to move from self-colored embellishment and introduced colored embroidery and contrast piping trim on dress bodices.
Celebrity Weddings of the Year - 1986
- In April 1986 Sarah Ferguson wed H.R.H. Prince Andrew (now divorced)
- Bob Geldof wed Paula Yates
- Arnold Schwarzenegger wed Maria Shriver.
Other Memorable Events of 1986
- Hole discovered in the ozone layer
- US space shuttle Challenger explodes on take off killing 7 astronauts.
- Devastating nuclear explosion at Chernobyl in the USSR
- Halley's Comet passes closest to the earth in its 30th perihelion a second visit in the 20th century. First visit was 1909 when the event was recorded on photograph plate.
- Hampton Court Palace burnt in fire. Damage takes years to repair.
Old photos can be useful when tracing family members and narrowing down search dates. These photo pages may help you put an era to your undated images.
Page added 20 October 2006
These wedding photos must not be published or used elsewhere - © Copyright www.fashion-era.com 2000-2023.
