The Modern-Day History of Wedding Invitations

The industrial revolution brought on many fundamental changes in the way our society interacts notably the printing press.  Everything was affected from newspapers to books with the creation known as lithography invented by Alois Senefelder in 1798.  Lithographing brought about the ability to produce sharp and detailed inking without the need to create engraving plates that could stamp images.  This carried over into everything, wedding invitations included.

With the ability to now produce truly mass produced wedding invitations, there was still the delivery aspect that needed to be taken into consideration.  During this time, most mail was still delivered by couriers, hand delivered to their recipients on horseback.  Wedding invitations were placed in a second envelope to protect them from harm during transit.  Also, most people receiving them were still of upper class.  When the wedding invitations would arrive, their exterior envelope would sometimes be dirty and abused.  The family’s butler would remove the invitation from its exterior envelope and present the recipient with a fresh, clean invitation.  Although our postal service has become vastly more swift and reliable, this is the reason that it is common practice to put your wedding invitation into another separate envelope.

Immediately following World War II, commercially printed wedding stationary started playing a major role in society.  Many credit the amount of incredible industrial growth and expansion of democracy as the reason more common folk could now mimic the social aspects of citizens who were previously considered upper class.  The growth in wedding invitations was also further progressed by the development of something known as thermography.

Thermography is a less expensive way of achieving raised type often attributed to the engraved printing methods that were previously popular on wedding invitations.  It presses the ink onto the paper without marking the paper, much similar to engraving.  With the advent of this, achieving similar looks and feels were now finally affordable to everyone.  Other more recent progressions in the wedding invitation world are the use of something called letterpress, where letters are pressed into the paper developing a unique feel.  Laser etching, although incredibly expensive and hard to find, has brought with it the ability to create incredibly unique invitations that can be laser etched into materials like acrylic and metal.  With such range and history behind something as simple as wedding invitations, we owe a lot to the pioneers of their time.  Without their progress in printing capability, wedding invitations may still be only available to those of nobility.