The Death of the Matching Bridesmaid Dress

When Kelsey Randall and Perry Fuchs began planning their October wedding in New York’s Hudson Valley, they always knew each member of their joint wedding party would wear different outfits. For starters, the group was co-ed. Dressing everyone in a floor-length dress wasn’t, well, impossible, but definitely a little unusual. Most of all, though, they just didn’t want to. Each member had such a distinct personality—and such distinct style. 

“We felt like the bridal party wasn’t there to be seen as token accessories,” Randall says. “We asked them to be part of our wedding day because their friendship had meant a lot to us as a couple. The ‘cookie cutter’ effect that matching dresses has just didn’t suit them and didn’t honor what makes them unique.” Instead, they asked their friends to stick to a color palette of gold, silver, copper, and black. When the group walked down the aisle, they did so in metallic fringed dresses, gold piano shawls, black leather minis, and even a pair of matching cowboy boots.

In the past few years, the popularity of mismatched bridesmaid dresses and outfits has skyrocketed. According to online wedding planning company Zola, more than 69 percent of couples dressed their wedding party in non-traditional outfits. In Vogue’s 2023 wedding trend report, top planner Augusta Cole cited matching dresses as falling by the wayside (“Offering your bridal party a bit of fashion autonomy is becoming the norm,” Cole said. she said). Dorothy Polka, editor of Polka Dot Wedding, echoed the same sentiment in the Wedding Academy’s 2023 trend report. And of the real weddings Vogue has run so far this year, the majority of couples opted to dress their bridesmaids in either different colors, prints, or silhouettes—sometimes, even a combination of all three. (A sizable handful even opted to have no bridesmaids at all.)

The idea that being a bridesmaid means spending an entire day (and evening) matching with several other women is almost as old as weddings themselves. The roots of the tradition have been argued as dating back to ancient feudal China. “A bride would have attendants to protect her from evil spirits,” Dr. Angela Thompson, who teaches sociology at Texas Christian University, told The New York Times in 2018. “By having several women who are dressed alike, the spirits, or kidnappers, wouldn’t know which person was the bride.” Over the millennia, empires fell and superstitions faded. The style, however, stuck.

It wasn’t just tradition that kept this approach in place, but also practicality. As the U.S. was still industrializing into the 19th century, most clothing was all custom or made to measure.  An outfit took weeks—or even months—to make. Multiple fittings were usually needed. So when brides and their party went to the salon, they’d select a pattern for their bridesmaids, provide sizing, and put in their order. It was really the only way to do things—even if the attendants weren’t always pleased with the aesthetics of the selections. (It turns out many weren’t: “Bridesmaids’ frocks have long suffered from monotony in design, want of taste in selection, and a startling variety in execution,” a frustrated maid wrote in a 1905 Pictorial Review article.)

Ready to wear—or, mass-manufactured clothing that was “ready to wear” the same day, at least—became the norm for women by World War I, and by the 1950s, over 90 percent of Americans were buying their clothes “off the rack” according to Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York by Nancy L. Green.

Yet even though the American consumer now had a greater variety of gowns than ever at the tip of their fingers, uniform bridesmaid styles still remained the norm for at least the next few decades. When Queen Elizabeth got married at Westminster Abbey in 1947, her bridesmaids wore matching white dresses, as did Jackie Kennedy’s at Newport’s Hammersmith Farm in 1953. Meanwhile, Grace Kelly put her maids in puffy sleeves and bonnets for her royal wedding to Prince Rainier.

Why, as fashion only got quicker and easier to make, did bridesmaid dresses not diversify? Simple: the aesthetics. Coordinating multiple looks that would look cohesive in photos remained difficult in the analog age. It was impossible, for example, to guarantee a department store had enough sizes of complementary looks in stock for everyone in the bridal party. And even if they did, no one had digital cameras, email, or cellphones, making it difficult for bridesmaids to double-check if it worked for the bride and the overall aesthetic of her wedding. “If you wanted to mix and match bridesmaid dresses, how were you going to coordinate that? Take everyone to the mall?” points out bridal stylist Anny Choi.

It’s also because it was just how things were done. Weddings, after all, are an ancient ritual whose central tenets have more or less stayed the same since the beginning—and bridesmaid dresses are no exception. They simply remained part of the culture of weddings, with women begrudgingly putting down hundreds of dollars at a bridal salon for a blush dress they’d never wear again. It even became a running gag in pop culture: movies like Bridesmaids, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Bachelorette, and 27 Dresses all poked fun at the ridiculousness of the process. (“The best thing is you can shorten it and wear it again!” a montage of brides tells a skeptical Katherine Heigl in the latter. She never does.)

Until the 2010s—when a handful of seismic changes shook everything up.

The first? Online shopping. By that decade, women had access to an almost unlimited amount of dresses, in a variety of sizes, deliverable to their homes within days. If the bride wanted a bridesmaid to wear blush, all they had to do is Google “blush dress,” pick the one that suited their style and budget, and email their link to the bride for approval. And despite the common trope of female bridezillas wanting everything to be exactly their way, it turns out most women were more than willing to let them personalize their outfit: The Knot found that brides putting their bridesmaids in the same dress fell from 55 percent in 2015 to 31 percent in 2020. “Most people want their friends to feel good at their wedding and are also aware that their friends are at such different places in life,” Choi says. “They might be doing great and have money to spend. But maybe they have student loans and therefore don’t have a big budget to spend on clothes. Or maybe they just have a baby and need to prioritize spending on childcare, not on a dress they’re going to wear once.” 2020, by the way, was another milestone year, with the pandemic shaking up the very notion of what a wedding should be. Nonessential businesses—including bridal salons—were closed, the number of people allowed to gather was restricted, and venues shut down, meaning the giant bridal party of 14 people was no longer the norm.

Then, there was the rise of social media. Suddenly, you could see the wedding of everyone you ever knew, from your elementary school classmate to that friend of a friend from college. With so much visibility came oversaturation: seeing several weddings with the bridesmaids wearing the exact same shade of dresses from a popular nationwide bridal salon made them seem old, fast. We all wanted to do something different. “Now, individuality is a trend across the board in weddings,” stylist Carrie Goldberg says. “That transcended into the bridal party.” Of Goldberg’s clients this year, not a single one has opted for matching bridesmaid dresses. Instead, they’ve asked her help in selecting unique re-wearable outfits for their attendants that fit everything from an earth tone palette, a mixed metallics palette, to a summer garden theme.

Lastly, the shift can also be ascribed to the rise of the co-ed wedding party. In 2019, 37 percent of couples had nontraditional parties with bridesmen and groomswomen—making such cookie-cutter designs outdated. Goldberg is currently working on a wedding where two women are in the groom’s party: They prefer wearing pants to dresses, so Goldberg is working on bespoke female suits that coordinate with the men. “Now, they can feel like themselves when they walk down the aisle for their best friend,” she says.

And perhaps that sums it up best: Weddings are celebratory occasions. If members of the bridal party are allowed more autonomy over their aesthetic choices—picking something that fits their body, style, and budget—they are more likely to feel one emotion above all else on someone’s wedding day: happiness.