Historically, Being a Bridesmaid Was a Terrible Gig
Bridesmaids were not originally there to hold your bouquet or cry on cue during the speeches. Originally, they were decoys.
The logic was simple and slightly horrifying. A bride on her wedding day was thought to be in danger from evil spirits, envious rivals and bad luck itself, all of which were apparently very invested in ruining the marriage before it had started. So she surrounded herself with a small cluster of women dressed exactly like her, on the theory that anything hunting her would get confused and go for the wrong woman. The matching outfits were, in fact, camouflage.
You can trace a version of this all the way back to ancient Rome, where the law required ten witnesses for a wedding to count. Bridesmaids and groomsmen would dress to resemble the couple, the idea being that if a malevolent spirit turned up looking to curse the newlyweds, it would be met by a crowd of near-identical people and lose its target in the crowd.
Which raises the obvious question. Why was anyone convinced that spirits cared so much about one woman in a nice dress?
Weddings were not viewed as simple celebrations. They were transition points. A woman was leaving one family and entering another, and according to the beliefs of the time, that made her vulnerable. The women around her could not be bystanders. They became a working security detail, dressed as her and standing close, ready to shield her from whatever came.
It is a strange thing to imagine at a modern wedding, that the woman in the lilac dress adjusting her heel by the aisle is the descendant of a human shield.
The bridesmaids were the visual defense while the herbs were the chemical one. The wedding bouquet began as a pungent thing to repel. Brides carried bundles of strong-smelling herbs and spices, and the favourites were…interesting. Garlic, dill and rosemary. Bitter greens with a kick to them.
A bad spirit, or a disease, was thought to be driven back by anything sharp enough to clear a room. Dill had a particular reputation. People called it the herb of lust and apparently believed that anyone who breathed it in at a wedding would be overcome with desire, which made it a sensible thing to wave around at an event with a very specific goal in mind. Rosemary stood for fidelity and remembrance and garlic was there to keep the unseen at bay, as usual.
The first bouquets probably smelled less like a florist and more like a kitchen. The flowers crept in later, once belief turned to legend and the bride was allowed to hold something beautiful instead of useful.
The bride’s luck could be lifted off her like lint. If you could get a piece of something she had touched on her wedding day, you could take a little of that luck home with you. Her dress qualified, and so did her flowers.
People would grab at the bride, tearing strips from her gown, snatching at her veil, pulling flowers loose from whatever she was carrying, all in a scramble to claim a scrap of good luck before it (she) walked out of the church. It was so deeply believed, that a bride could finish her own wedding partly undressed, and at some point someone clearly decided this could not continue.
The bouquet toss, usually filed under harmless fun, was born. If the crowd wanted a piece of you for luck, the cleverest move was to give them something else to chase. The brides started flinging objects into the throng, a bunch of flowers or a piece of their outfits, and then using the chaos to escape.
So the next time a bridesmaid steps into a matching dress and stands beside her friend at the altar, it is worth remembering that she is participating in a tradition that once involved decoys, garlic, and a collective effort to outsmart evil spirits.
Not bad for a role that now mostly involves invitation boxes and a group chat.