For some fun see Richard Paul’s 50 interesting wedding facts!!!!

Good Luck and Bad Luck

1. Hey, brides, tuck a sugar cube into your glove -- according to Greek culture, the sugar will sweeten your union.

2. The English believe a spider found in a wedding dress means good luck. Yikes!

3. In English tradition, Wednesday is considered the "best day" to marry, although Monday is for wealth and Tuesday is for health.

4. The groom carries the bride across the threshold to bravely protect her from evil spirits lurking below.

5. Saturday is the unluckiest wedding day, according to English folklore. Funny -- it's the most popular day of the week to marry!

6. Ancient Romans studied pig entrails to determine the luckiest time to marry.

7. Rain on your wedding day is actually considered good luck, according to Hindu tradition!

8. For good luck, Egyptian women pinch the bride on her wedding day. Ouch!

9. Middle Eastern brides paint henna on their hands and feet to protect themselves from the evil eye.

10. Peas are thrown at Czech newlyweds instead of rice.

11. A Swedish bride puts a silver coin from her father and a gold coin from her mother in each shoe to ensure that she'll never do without.

12. A Finnish bride traditionally went door-to-door collecting gifts in a pillowcase, accompanied by an older married man who represented long marriage.

13. Moroccan women take a milk bath to purify themselves before their wedding ceremony.

14. In Holland, a pine tree is planted outside the newlyweds' home as a symbol of fertility and luck.

It's Got a Ring To It

15. Engagement and wedding rings are worn on the fourth finger of the left hand because it was once thought that a vein in that finger led directly to the heart.

16. About 70% of all brides sport the traditional diamond on the fourth finger of their left hand.

17. Priscilla Presley's engagement ring was a whopping 3 1/2-carat rock surrounded by a detachable row of smaller diamonds.

18. Diamonds set in gold or silver became popular as betrothal rings among wealthy Venetians toward the end of the fifteenth century.

19. In the symbolic language of jewels, a sapphire in a wedding ring means marital happiness.

20. A pearl engagement ring is said to be bad luck because its shape echoes that of a tear.

21. One of history's earliest engagement rings was given to Princess Mary, daughter of Henry VIII. She was two years old at the time.

22. Seventeen tons of gold are made into wedding rings each year in the United States!

23. Snake rings dotted with ruby eyes were popular wedding bands in Victorian England -- the coils winding into a circle symbolized eternity.

24. Aquamarine represents marital harmony and is said to ensure a long, happy marriage.

Fashionable Lore

25. Queen Victoria started the Western world's white wedding dress trend in 1840 -- before then, brides simply wore their best dress.

26. In Asia, wearing robes with embroidered cranes symbolizes fidelity for the length of a marriage.

27. Ancient Greeks and Romans thought the veil protected the bride from evil spirits. Brides have worn veils ever since.

28. On her wedding day, Grace Kelly wore a dress with a bodice made from beautiful 125-year-old lace.

29. Of course, Jackie Kennedy's bridesmaids were far from frumpy. She chose pink silk faille and red satin gowns created by African-American designer Ann Lowe (also the creator of Jackie's dress).

30. In Japan, white was always the color of choice for bridal ensembles -- long before Queen Victoria popularized it in the Western world.

31. Most expensive wedding ever? The marriage of Sheik Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum's son to Princess Salama in Dubai in May 1981. The price tag? $44 million.

32. In Korea, brides don bright hues of red and yellow to take their vows.

33. Brides carry or wear "something old" on their wedding day to symbolize continuity with the past.

34. In Denmark, brides and grooms traditionally cross-dressed to confuse evil spirits!

35. The "something blue" in a bridal ensemble symbolizes purity, fidelity, and love.

Food and Family

36. In Egypt, the bride's family traditionally does all the cooking for a week after the wedding, so the couple can…relax.

37. In South Africa, the parents of both bride and groom traditionally carried fire from their hearths to light a new fire in the newlyweds' hearth.

38. The tradition of a wedding cake comes from ancient Rome, where revelers broke a loaf of bread over a bride's head for fertility's sake.

39. The custom of tiered cakes emerged from a game where the bride and groom attempted to kiss over an ever-higher cake without knocking it over.

40. Queen Victoria's wedding cake weighed a whopping 300 pounds.

41. Legend says single women will dream of their future husbands if they sleep with a slice of groom's cake under their pillows.

42. An old wives' tale: If the younger of two sisters marries first, the older sister must dance barefoot at the wedding or risk never landing a husband.

Show Off at a Cocktail Party

43. In many cultures around the world -- including Celtic, Hindu and Egyptian weddings -- the hands of a bride and groom are literally tied together to demonstrate the couple's commitment to each other and their new bond as a married couple (giving us the popular phrase "tying the knot").

44. The Roman goddess Juno rules over marriage, the hearth, and childbirth, hence the popularity of June weddings.

45. Princess Victoria established the tradition of playing Wagner's "Bridal Chorus" during her wedding processional in 1858.

46. The bride stands to the groom's left during a Christian ceremony, because in bygone days the groom needed his right hand free to fight off other suitors.

47. On average, 7,000 couples marry each day in the United States.

48. Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve are the two busiest "marriage" days in Las Vegas -- elopement central!

49. The Catholic tradition of "posting the banns" to announce a marriage originated as a way to ensure the bride and groom were not related.

50. Stag parties were first held by ancient Spartan soldiers, who kissed their bachelor days goodbye with a raucous party.

The traditional full morning dress, also known as top hat and tails, is made up of a morning coat, waistcoat, trousers and often a top hat as seen in this etiquette guide. Simon Andrews and Richard Pygott, historical fashion advisers, explain that the most common morning dress is made up of "a standard black morning coat matched with cashmere striped trousers and dove grey single or double breasted waistcoat. Neckwear in silver or grey tones."

Men's formal morning dress evolved in the late 18th Century. Fashion historian Caroline Cox explains: "After the French revolution, men looked for a way of dressing that was not connected to the aristocracy. It evolved out of men's sportswear as it was masculine and not over-embellished." The tailcoat started out as a riding coat that fell to the knee. In the mid-18th Century it is believed an English country squire had had enough of the fabric getting in the way of his saddle and asked his tailor to cut into the coat creating the tails that went over the horse's flanks. Andrews and Pygott explain: "A lot of fashion history is based on what the most fashionable and richest people were wearing at a point in time and it was the predominant formal dress until around 1910."

It has been the standard wedding hire outfit from the 1930s to the present day and has also found a home at the races.

Today morning dress is commonly worn by male members of a wedding party - the groom, fathers of the bride and groom, best man and ushers.

Morning wear is also worn at other formal social events such as Royal Ascot, royal garden parties, Trooping the Colour and other royal events. It may also be worn at society funerals and memorial services. It used to be worn at social occasions like cricket matches and the theatre (hence the dress circle). Pupils at Eton still wear morning dress to school every day.

Bernadette Chapman, from the UK Alliance of Wedding Planners, says: "No matter what the budget of the wedding, from £10,000 to £100,000, they want the groom, ushers and parents in morning dress." But she says only very high-end weddings would have guests in morning suits and that would be indicated in the dress code on the wedding invitation.

She reports a new trend for more casual weddings and black tie weddings where all the wedding guests will wear black tie "because no matter how scruffy the male guest is, put him in black tie and he'll look elegant".

richardpaulhire.co.uk morning dress hire company point out the popularity of personalising the morning suit today. "For weddings, where the individual bride and groom can determine just how conventional their dress code should be, alternative colours can be selected for the morning suit. A more colourful and expressive waistcoat is a very popular way of complementing the conventional morning suit."

"In the world of men's clothes, nothing is more beautiful or useless than the tailcoat," says Nicholas Antongiavanni, author of The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men's Style and an article entitled Tailcoats: An Elegy. "One of the few garments of which the sartorial cliche is actually true: that it makes a man, any man, look his splendid best. If it fits and is well cut, the tailcoat can turn any man - short or gangly, fat or lanky - into an Adonis. No one looked better in tails than Fred Astaire, who was short, wispy, and not particularly handsome. But when we see him dressed to the nines, we hardly notice his deficiencies. Astaire, never forgetting how much tails did for his appearance, donned them in movie after movie."

GENTLEMEN.

Ascot races royal enclosure.

Gentlemen are kindly reminded that it is a requirement to wear either black or grey morning dress which must include:

* A waistcoat and tie (no cravats)

* A black or grey top hat

* Black shoes

A gentleman may remove his top hat within a restaurant, a private box, a private club or that facility's terrace, blacony or garden. Hats may also be removed within any enclosed external seating area within the Royal Enclosure Garden.

The customisationof top hats [with, for example, coloured ribbons or bands] is not permitted in the royal enclosure.

1 

What to wear? Woe betide anyone forgetting the rigid dress code, dating back to the days of Beau Brummell. It’s toppers and morning dress in the Royal Enclosure, suit and tie in the Grandstand where ‘Ladies are required to dress in a manner appropriate to a smart occasion. Many wear hats, although this is not obligatory.’ If they didn’t, why would the BBC be sending Kate Silverton to check ’em out?

2

Ascot’s first ever race took place on 11 August, 1711, with each horse carrying a weight of 12st. The race consisted of three separate heats, each of four miles (about the same as the Grand National), so the winner – name sadly unknown – would have been a mighty strong beast.

3

The royal procession began in 1825. King George IV drove up the centre of the course in front of the crowds, a tradition that continues to the present day.

4

Divorcees were banned from the Royal Enclosure until 1955, when the divorce laws were changed.

5

The 2005 Royal Meeting was held at York while Ascot was rebuilt. Everything moved north – even the bell used to tell jockeys to get ready for the next race.

6

The Queen has owned 19 Royal Ascot winners – and probably had a bet on them all.

7

In 1813, an Act of Parliament ensured that Ascot would always be a public racecourse. In 1913, another Act created the Ascot Authority, which still manages the course.

8

Until 1945, the only racing at Ascot was the Royal Meeting. There are 20 racedays this year, including last month’s ‘soft opening’ of the new grandstand.

9

Not everyone is impressed with the new facilities. ‘Why does every stand have to be designed like an airport?’ quipped one disgruntled punter. ‘I’ve spent an hour looking for the duty free.’

10

Nor do all racegoers love Royal Ascot. Many believe the meeting has lapsed into self-parody, with the high-class action on the track barely noticed by preening oiks interested only in hats, booze – and, of course, themselves.

Dinner Jacket

The dinner jacket emerged from an era when it was considered proper for upper-class men to dress formally for the evening meal. A comfortable, less formal alternative to a tailcoat, a jacket with long flaps in the back, the dinner jacket, or tuxedo jacket as it is sometimes called, has become the most common type of men's formal wear since the 1890s.

While upper-class formal wear for Western men had been frilly during the 1700s, the 1800s saw the introduction of a more restrained, tailored style. The particularly fashionable British writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) popularized the color black both for men's formal and everyday wear, and by the mid-1800s men's formal dress was largely defined as "white tie and tails," that is, a white bow tie worn with a stiff white shirt front and a black coat with long tails in the back.

By the late 1800s clothing styles were beginning to become slightly looser. While vacationing at his estate in Cowes, England, the British prince of Wales, Edward VII (1841–1910), sought a more comfortable alternative to the usual formal dinner attire. His tailor modified a popular military-style short black jacket called a mess jacket, to create a semiformal dinner jacket for the prince. The new jacket was dubbed the "Cowes jacket," after the first place it was worn.

In 1886 the prince had an American named James Potter as a guest at his country estate. Potter liked Prince Edward's new formal wear and had a jacket made for himself. When he wore his new dinner jacket at the elite upper-class resort of Tuxedo Park in New York, it instantly became popular. Alternatively, some historians report that a New York socialite named Griswold Lorillard cut the tails off his formal coat in 1886 at the Tuxedo Park Autumn Ball, starting the fad. In either case, the new jacket soon took on the name of the resort and became known simply as a tuxedo.

In 1930 Philadelphia tailors Marliss and Max Rudolphker produced the first mass-marketed ready-to-wear tuxedos. During the economically depressed 1930s, dashing tuxedos became a symbol of hope, asHollywood movies popularized not only the black "tux" but also the white dinner jacket and the velvet and brocade versions called smoking jackets.

Dinner jackets have remained the fundamental ingredient of men's formal attire into the 2000s. Though each decade has seen slight alterations, wide lapels during the 1920s, narrow lapels during the 1930s, bright-colored brocades during the 1960s and 1970s, the basic style has changed little from Edward VII's original Cowes jacket. While "white tie" formal occasions still call for a tailcoat, far more common is the "black tie" occasion, which demands that men wear a tuxedo.

Black Tie: Bond Gets It Wrong

Most of the time the only black tie rule that Bond typically breaks is forgoing a waist-covering, such as a waistcoat or cummerbund. In Licence to Kill he remembers the cummerbund, but overall the outfit looks like a rental. Whether or not you approve of notch lapels on a dinner jacket these are atrocious, and the satin on the revers accentuates the low 1989 gorge. The low button-stance isn’t nearly as bad as the fact that there are two buttons. A single-breasted dinner jacket should never have more than one button, any more is unacceptable. Only can a double-breasted dinner jacket have more than one button on the front.

The rest of the details are fine: jetted pockets, 3-button cuffs and no vents. As for the cut, it is a size too large, the shoulders have too much padding and are too wide, the sleeves are too long and the jacket fits too large through the body. This cut is typical of late 80s fashion and contributes to Licence to Kill being sartorially the worst film of the series.

Bond’s trousers have double reverse pleats and a silk braid down the leg. They are worn with white braces. Bond’s shirt has a fancy striped bib and a placket front with four onyx studs (the only time Bond wears onyx studs), an undersized spread collar and double cuffs. Bond’s silk barathea bow tie is cut in a narrow batwing shape. Bond’s shoes are black patent slip-ons.