(guitar music) - Queen Victoria was very influential in fashion in many different aspects.

One of the main influences that she had was on white wedding dresses.

Before she wore her white wedding dresses, other people had worn white wedding dresses, but it wasn't the common tradition.

The reason she chose to wear a white wedding dress was to show off the handmade Honiton lace that was a cottage industry in Devon that was suffering from manufactured lace over in the continent.

This is a later-date style, and this is machine-made lace, but you can see that she did have a dress that had lace trim on the skirt and she also had a lace shawl that she wore.

As her influence increased, the white wedding dress became a symbol of status.

So it was not practical to wear again because it was white and so it became quite the show of wealth and power and money.

The white wedding dress did not come about as a symbol of purity but more as a symbol of status.

When Prince Albert died in 1861, she went into a period, an extended period of deep mourning that she never actually recovered from.

She always wore black from the 1860s onward.

She actually instituted in her court full mourning for three years, which was unheard of.

So this is where we get that image of the Victorian Era as being somewhat dark and gothic, and in fact, a lot of what we may consider to be our funerary practices and mourning practices were sort of heightened at that time when she was in mourning.

She really had this black and white influence on the whole 19th century.