Verily, Vera

I'm not quite a die-hard fan of Vera Wang's wedding dresses, but I am a fan of Vera herself. I remember when the Lifetime channel was getting into the wedding-tv craze, they would air a biography of her every so often, and I watched it nearly every time it was on.

When I heard her describe her latest line on the Martha Stewart Show "wedding" episode last spring, I thought it seemed uninspired. What bride wants to look like her dress just came from the washing machine??

But when it comes to individual dresses and ideas, Vera's thought process is so interesting. Ivanka Trump's beautiful dress got lots of people thinking twice about how beautiful & sexy one can be... without showing everything! Ivanka is pictured below, with her dress inspiration, Princess Grace.

from here

In this video, Vera talks through her process for Ivanka's dress, and makes some interesting points regarding chastity, class, and modesty in wedding dresses. She also throws out the idea that not too long ago, it would never have been proper for a woman of a higher class to wear a revealing dress. Imagine that!

In speaking about this dress, Vera reported that she is "tired" of the past 15 years of strapless dresses... and I do have to say it seems kind of ubiquitous. It would be great for sleeves, or, coverage in general, to be seen as an equally beautiful option instead of being relegated to the un-sexy, or the über-traditional (I'm referring to the media at large here -- in real life we know how beautiful dresses with sleeves can be!).

Ivanka is a recent convert to Orthodox Judaism, and presumably decided on sleeves for this reason. But what if that wasn't the reason? Currently, several of the articles describing her dress are quick to make the excuse, almost as if to say, "Well, she could have been sexy, but her religion got in the way."

It's true, we liberated women don't need to trumpet our chastity down the aisle. But wouldn't it be even more progressive if we acknowledged the complexity of both? That one doesn't have to choose, that you can be both sexy and tasteful at once, that maybe your sexiness lies in your decision to be tasteful? That maybe there are other things to be on your wedding day besides sexy*? And who defines that, anyway?

*Seriously, I think it's great to be sexy on your wedding day! I'm mostly complaining about the definition of it, and wondering about how susceptible we are to those mass media definitions.