Jeltje Gordon-Lennox - Crafting Meaningful Wedding Rituals: A Practical Guide

CRAFTING
MEANINGFUL
WEDDING

RITUALS

A PRACTICAL GUIDE

Jeltje Gordon-Lennox

Foreword by Tiu de Haan

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia

CONTENTS

RITUAL TOOLBOX

LIST OF TOOLS WITH THEIR ICONS

Pages marked with a can be downloaded from www.jkp.com/catalogue/book/9781785923906 .

FOREWORD

Theres a magical shop in a cobbled street in North London where they sell vintage dresses. This is no charity shop, with bountiful bargains and colourful bric-a-brac, but rather a museum of antique artworks which happen to be able to be worn on the body.

There are beaded gowns in metallic hues, hung like shimmering paintings on the wall, kimonos of hand-painted silk adorned with muted birds and faded flowers, a rack of improbably dainty shoes. There is a bowl of satin gloves fastened with tiny mother of pearl buttons at the wrist, a glass cabinet displaying buckles and brooches and a vase of ostrich feathers erupting in regal profusion beside the brocade curtain of the changing room.

Imagine a wedding dress is on display. It is clearly made for a woman born in another era, one where we had to contain our emotions, as well as our bodies, in tighter constraints than perhaps we do today. This dress is stiffened with whalebone corsetry, embroidered with intricate patterns, its fragile threads sewn together by a seamstress whose minute, precise stitches show her deftness and skill.

Now imagine asking if you can try it on, watching as it is lowered from its pride of place on the wall behind the till. Imagine drawing back the sweep of the curtain in the changing room, heavy and thick on its brass hoops, pulling off your jeans and boots, wriggling out of your t-shirt, shedding one era in readiness for another. Imagine taking it carefully from its satin hanger and easing it over your head and shoulders, feeding your arms into its delicate sleeves, worried you might snag its lace, inhaling as you slip it over your belly for fear that you might accidentally force its seams as you do so. Perhaps you ask a friend or shop assistant to help do up the innumerable buttons at the back, arranging its flowing fabric to hang over the curve of your hips.

You turn and gaze at yourself in the mirror. You look like you are from another time, transported by the dress into a bride to be who has no mobile phone with which to share her outfit on social media, whose innocence hasnt been sullied and whose romantic ideals havent been shattered by breakups, broken hearts and pragmatism.

You might quite like this new old you. You might even long for a time of formality and decorum, where you didnt have to feel the weight of so many choices. You certainly love the dress. Its beautiful, after all, so precious and so old, carrying in its folds the invisible echoes of the wedding day of the woman for whom it was made. You can picture her young and blushing as she wore this gorgeous garment, then bright with newness and freshly fitted to her form, now carefully preserved through the years for this moment, unimaginable to its maker and original owner, when a twenty-first-century woman would try it on to see if it might just be her dress. The dress. The one that you will wear on what is purportedly the biggest day of your life.