Swedish wedding avaA Swedish wedding is a truly exceptional and cheerful occasion. These people have so many wedding customs you won’t find anywhere else in the world. And even more curious, Swedes don’t do most commonplace wedding traditions performed everywhere else. Like throwing the wedding bouquet or the bride’s father walking her down the aisle, etc. Instead, there are multiple wedding customs and rituals that will be totally new for you. This makes a Swedish wedding so unique.

Swedish wedding attire avaWedding outfits in the 19th century were rather sophisticated. Even today, a lot of grooms wear imitations of 19th-century dress suits, with their extravagant cravats, hats, walking sticks, and other lovely accessories. But not only universal Western-style groomswear was popular at the time. Instead, men often dressed in traditional clothing for their wedding. Here is an example of Swedish groom’s full set of wedding clothes from the early-mid 19th century. It looks both elegant and traditional.

wedding cup3 avaDuring Swedish, Finnish, Sami weddings, special wedding rituals were traditionally performed – the bride and groom drank from a single vessel, usually wooden and rather ornate, to celebrate their union. This ritual is at least several centuries old. To prove that, we can find these wedding cups in various Scandinavian museums. Today, the newlyweds drink champagne from delicate glass flutes, in the past, people used intricately-carved wooden cups. Like the one we’d like to show you below.

bridal crown avaWe’ve already published posts about Swedish and Norwegian traditional bridal crowns. Most often, they were gold, silver, or gold-plated and very intricately made. But what if a woman couldn’t afford such an expensive ceremonial jewelry item? Did she just go down the aisle without a crown? You would be surprised about how inventive and skilled were Swedish brides and what materials they used to create wedding crowns for their bridal attire. Glass, thread, metal, birch root, and even straw. And such bridal crowns were almost as elaborate as gold ones.

Swedish gown avaHow did wedding dresses look like at the beginning of the 20th century in Sweden? Did they differ much from other European wedding gowns from the period? Were they similar to traditional Swedish wedding attire or totally modern? Here’s a small collection of wedding dresses from the early 1900s. They are preserved by the American Swedish Institute in the US. And looking at these 100-year-old bridal gowns, we can learn more about Swedish wedding fashion.