Up until the mid-20th century, a bride’s wedding dress would have been black. White, the hardest colour to process into fabric, was not the usual bridal colour until relatively recently. In the old days hereabouts, it was said that a marriage started in black and ended in black, since that was the colour of the bride’s dress and, later, of the married woman’s shroud; a colour which has for long been associated solely with gravity, solemnity, and mourning.
Having such a dress made by a tailor or seamstress was costly, of course, and not every family could afford one.