Why do we have bridesmaids, and why do they dress alike?

The internet's answer is that ancient Roman bridesmaids dressed exactly like the bride to confuse evil spirits or jealous suitors. Trace that sentence back and it lands on a CNN listicle, a Cosmopolitan piece and a popular author, never on a Roman.¹ The Romans left us their marriage law, and it says something more interesting.

Ten witnesses, for one kind of wedding

The jurist Gaius, writing in the second century, describes confarreatio, the old religious marriage of the patrician class: a sacrifice to Jupiter, "a cake of spelt," a set form of words, "in the presence of ten witnesses."² That is the origin of the "ten bridesmaids" claim, and it is not about maids. The other Roman forms needed fewer: coemptio, a mock sale, wanted "at least five witnesses, citizens of Rome above the age of puberty, besides a balance holder."² Witnesses, men, holding a scale. Not a bridal party in matching stolas.

The Bible gets pulled in too, because Laban gave each of his daughters a maidservant at her wedding: Zilpah to Leah, Bilhah to Rachel.³ They were servants, and Genesis gives them no role in the ceremony.

10 February 1840: twelve dresses, one sketch

The matched bridal party has a birthday. Queen Victoria, twenty years old, designed her bridesmaids' dresses herself: a white dress "trimmed with sprays of roses on the bodice and skirt," with "a matching spray of roses" in the hair, according to the Royal Collection's record of her sketch.⁴ The twelve were the eldest daughters of peers, and twelve attendants carried her train down the aisle.⁴⁵ White was the point. It was, in the words of the V&A's wedding-dress curator Edwina Ehrman, "a very, very expensive color, and most people couldn't afford to have a white dress in their wardrobe, so it was a special color, a prestigious color."⁶ Twelve girls in white was a statement about the household paying for them.

Then color, and a bill

When exactly the matched colored dress replaced white is not documented in any museum or history opened for this shelf; what a museum does hold is the result. Aberdeen's collection has a green satin and chiffon bridesmaid's dress made locally around 1956, one of a set.⁷ By your grandmother's decade the pattern was fixed: a color, a fabric, a matched row.

The cost landed on the maids. The Knot's survey of nearly seventeen thousand couples married in 2024 put the average bridesmaid dress at $128, unchanged since 2021, and the all-in cost of being a bridesmaid at around $1,900 once travel, gifts and parties are counted.⁸⁹ A 2016 survey of dress shoppers got $1,324.¹⁰ Emily Post saw this coming in 1922 and did not like it: every article worn by the bridesmaids "must be paid for by the wearers," and "many a young girl has had to refuse the joy of being in the wedding party because a complete bridesmaid outfit costs a sum that parents of moderate means are quite unable to meet."¹¹

Why your mother cares

Your mother's bridesmaids were her sisters and her best friends in a color she chose, in a photograph she still has. What she remembers is not the dress. It is who stood there. The Roman witnesses were there to say the marriage happened; that is still the whole job. Everything else, the sketch, the color, the $128, is upholstery.