Wedding Gowns & Bridal Fashion

Lacis Museum is not precisely a museum — it is a shrine to all things lace: a shop, a library, an exhibit hall, a history lesson.

Playing on a small screen is a video, How to Make a Victorian Corset; lace doilies and veils shroud the walls; tatters tat away in a library nook; and tucked away in a back room full of delicate wedding laces is the current exhibit. A dozen wedding dresses and accoutrements outline a bridal history from the 1850s to the 1930s. We learn that Queen Victoria was the first to wear what we now think of as a traditional white wedding gown (in 1840); gaze upon folds of luxurious cloths and the sparkle of thousands of tiny beads; and glimpse wedding-night garters, bras, and intricate silken robes. These garments are as much testimonies to painstaking work and delicacy of craft as they are to the questionable power of the bridal fantasy and the price one will pay to live out one’s own. (Through August 4 at 2982 Adeline St, Berkeley; LacisMuseum.org or 510-843-7290.)

Source: East Bay Express