Something Blue: The Rhyme, the Blue Garter, the Garter Toss

"Something blue" is the fourth item in the English wedding rhyme "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue," first recorded in a London magazine story of 1871. The blue was usually a garter. The garter toss that goes with it is far younger than its reputation: a staged toss is not documented before the 1950s.

Five years from print to "ancient custom"

The earliest known version sits in a short story, "Marriage Superstitions, and the Miseries of a Bride Elect," in the St James's Magazine in 1871. Its narrator says that on the wedding day she must "wear something new, something borrowed, something blue." Nothing old yet. The full four-part line turns up in the Staffordshire Advertiser of 21 October 1876, describing a bride who "wore, according to ancient custom, something old and something new, something borrowed and blue." Five years from first print to ancient custom is quick work, even for the Victorians.

The rhyme then spread and varied. The Belfast Naturalists' Field Club recorded it as County Monaghan folklore in 1894. The folklorist T. F. Thiselton-Dyer, in Folk-lore of Women (1905), gave a Leicestershire version that leaves out the old item and called the four-part form "a Lancashire version." The same year it reached American fiction in Emily Post's novel Purple and Fine Linen. The sixpence in the shoe is a later Victorian addition, worn in the left shoe; a Kansas paper, the Iola Register, described it in 1885 as a Scottish custom.

Why something blue ended up on a garter

The 1871 narrator explains the logic herself. A bride had to wear white, so the blue could not go on the dress, and she settles on a blue garter, quoting "Honi soit qui mal y pense," the motto of the Order of the Garter, which Edward III founded in 1348. White had become the expected color only recently. Queen Victoria married in 1840 in cream silk satin trimmed with Honiton lace, a dress that helped make the white wedding gown fashionable without being its only origin. With the gown white, the blue moved underneath.

William Crooke, writing in the journal Folklore in 1898, confirmed the habit: the something blue "takes, I am given to understand, usually the form of a garter." He read the old and blue items as devices to baffle the Evil Eye, and said the borrowed item should properly be an undergarment from a woman who had borne children, since clothes were thought to pass on fertility.

Blue meant true long before the rhyme

The color carried its meaning for at least two centuries before 1871. In Nathan Field's comedy A Woman's a Weather-Cocke (1612), Sir Abraham Ninny declares "off garters blue; Which signifies Sir Abram's love was true." An English satire, The Fifteen Comforts of Marriage, has bridesmaids reject yellow ribbons for jealousy and choose "true blue, that signifies constancy." Modern explanations often add the Virgin Mary's blue robes or the line "married in blue, love ever true." Those are repeated far more often than they are sourced, and Thiselton-Dyer noted that in some districts blue was thought unlucky for the wedding dress itself.

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a pair of knitted white cotton garters bound with pale blue silk satin, dated 1798 and knitted with the initials "V E / C '98." The museum says they are said to have been made for a wedding but has no provenance. If the story is true, they put blue on a bride's leg 73 years before the rhyme appears in print.

Garters as trophies, 1612 to 1719

The blue garter rode on a much older custom: guests took the bride's garters. Christopher Brooke's Epithalamium of 1614 tells the youths to take the groom's points (his lace ties) and the maidens to take "her garters." Robert Herrick's nuptial song for Sir Clipseby Crew, written in 1625 and printed in Hesperides in 1648, asks the bride to "let the young men and the bride-maids share / Your garters."

The fullest description comes from a French traveler, Maximilien Misson, whose observations on England appeared in 1698 and in English in 1719. At bedtime, he wrote, the bride-men "pull off the bride's garters, which she had before untied, that they might hang down and so prevent a curious hand from coming too near her knee." The garters were then fastened to the gallants' hats. In the north of England the scramble could happen at the altar. A Yorkshire clergyman told the antiquary John Brand that brides handed out garters from the bosom to head off the assault. A note from Northumberland in 1686 says the wedding piper always had a piece of the bride's garter tied around his pipes. The 1905 edition of Brand's Popular Antiquities adds that the bride was generally gartered with ribbons for the day, easy to untie and share.

Throwing the stocking

The "next to marry" prophecy belongs to a different garment. The first Oxford English Dictionary quotes the Ladies Dictionary of 1694: the bride "must sit up to have it thrown at her Nose," and whoever the stocking struck would be the next of the company to marry. By about 1845 the humorist R. H. Barham called it "a practice that's now discontinued as shocking."

The garter toss is a 1950s invention

The groom peeling off the garter and flinging it at the single men is usually sold as medieval, often with a story about proof of consummation. The sourcing for that story is thin. The fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell told Vogue she had found no evidence of a staged garter toss at a wedding before the mid-1950s. She suspects it came from wartime USO shows, where performers tossed garters to the troops. By the 1960s, magazines were calling it a tradition. In 2018 ABC News, citing The Knot's 2017 survey, reported 37 percent of brides had one.

Hidden blue at royal weddings

Royal brides kept the blue out of sight. Lady Diana Spencer's 1981 dress had a small blue bow sewn into the waist. In 2018 Meghan Markle had blue fabric from her first-date dress sewn into her gown. The modern bridal garter, a band of lace or satin, is not normally used to hold up stockings at all. It exists to be worn once and removed in public.

The Underpinnings Museum owns a pair of 1930s American bridal garters in pale green silk georgette, trimmed with pale blue silk ribbon. They were found with a note saying they had been "passed onto multiple brides": old, borrowed and blue in one pair.

Last updated October 28, 2026

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