Product Description
This informative guide to planning a period wedding provides the bride-to-be with historic photos and images of wedding fashions and decorating ideas from each decade of the early 20th century. Complete with color photos of period wedding attire and modern period-inspired designs, it also includes guidelines for seasonal attire, formal and informal wedding wear, proper accessories, bridal bouquets, and boutonniere trends. Decorating ideas include color charts, schem… More >>

Vintage Wedding: Simple Ideas for Creating a Romantic Vintage Wedding

3 Responses

1. Penumbra

   June 1, 2010 at 2:15 am

   You don’t actually need to be planning a retro wedding to enjoy this book. If you have a photo of your mom, grandmother, or great-grandmother at her wedding, this book will give you a good idea about what was going on behind the scenes. It’s a fascinating look at the fashions of the day, and how they changed over the decades.

   If you’re planning to wear grandma’s wedding dress and want to make your own wedding true to the period, this book will give you the low down on what undergarments and shoes work with the gown and how the veil should be arranged.

   It was fun seeing how the wedding cake evolved over the first half of the 20th century. The author even includes cake recipes for each decade – and the basic cake recipe did change! It was amazing to learn that a bride in the 1910’s may have made her own cake a day or two in advance, and by the 1940’s she may have baked the cake, but would have taken it to a bakery to have it professionally frosted.

   The information about the flowers is also very interesting. There are lists of flowers that were popular through the years, with some flowers remaining in favor. So a bride in 1910 or 1950 may have carried lily of the valley and orange blossom, but bouquet construction definitely went through some changes. For the nosegay type bouquet the author includes a diagram of how the base is put together that you can try yourself, or take to your florist.

   For each decade, there are color palettes that show you how the popular shades changed for the bride, groom, and bridesmaids. There are representative menus for the reception. There are song lists of the popular music that would have been heard. There are even examples of how the invitations were worded and printed, plus the “at home” cards.

   There is a nice section of material on how the groom’s fashions changed as well. This includes a section on the current formal wear, or uniform or suit – plus diagrams of how to fold the pocket handkerchief and how to make the appropriate knot for the tie.

   The book is simple, but it does include a lot of detail covering a 50 year period. It will satisfy your curiosity about grandma’s wedding pictures, and it’s a great place to start researching for your own retro wedding.
   Rating: 5 / 5

2. S. Allen

   June 1, 2010 at 5:11 am

   This book is great! I picked it up to get some ideas to create a period wedding. This book has information on everything I could think of from attire, to recipes, to color palletes. It’s a must-have for anyone thinking of planning a vintage wedding. It even lists sites one might want to check out for a wedding location and all the information is up-to-date. Check it out!
   Rating: 5 / 5

3. K. Whisler

   June 1, 2010 at 5:41 am

   This book gives a quick overview, but lacks detail. For example, the section on bridesmaids has one page per decade, each page with three or four short paragraphs and one illustration. Other information is rather general: the section on vintage wedding flowers is a list of flowers that were popular from 1910 to 1950, with no breakdown by decade. Why not include more specific information, such as the fact that when Grace Kelly was married in 1954, she carried a bouquet of lilies of the valley and a small bible? There are decent suggestions of things to consider when planning a wedding with a period feel (i.e. if you want someone to design a period wedding dress for you, find someone who knows what he or she is doing), but they don’t go into more detail than one might expect in a magazine article, assuming one could find an article on the topic. The glossary is for the most part a pointless waste of space. For example, it contains definitions like “boot: men’s or women’s footwear that covers the foot and part of the leg” and “short sleeve: a sleeve length that comes to the middle of the upper arm.” It does not include definitions of terms like “tarlatan,” which are actually used in the book, such as in the reprinted 1949 directions on how to make a nosegay bouquet. (In case you are wondering, tarlatan is a kind of open-weave muslin/cotton organdy that has been stiffly starched.) I have no doubt that someone who needs to have “chiffon” defined (which is included in the glossary) would also need to have tarlatan defined.

   More potentially useful is the list of historic venues for weddings. The list is quite scanty (I know for a fact that there is more than one suitable venue in Iowa) but might serve to jog one’s memory to think of more in one’s own area. It appears to have better coverage for sites in California.

   This would be a good book for someone with a general desire to have a wedding with a vintage feel, but who doesn’t have a handle on what kind of things were fashionable in different periods. Someone who already is interested in a given period (particularly if that interest lies in fashion) probably already knows most of what is in the book and probably knows where to look up everything else. Might be useful as a starting point in the early planning stages.
   Rating: 3 / 5

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