Honi soit qui mal y pense (part 2).

The ‘garter ceremony’ certainly is one of the strangest French wedding traditions.
It takes place at the end of the meal when the bride climbs on a table and the best man ties a garter around her thigh, just above the knee.
The whole ceremony consists of having the guests put money in a basket being passed around.
When a man puts money, the best man raises the bride’s dress, the more money given by men in the audience, the higher up it gets. And the role of women in the audience is of course to have the dress being lowered by also throwing coins. Thus women act contrary to men who are somehow portrayed as only interested in seeing the bride’s leg. While reciprocally, women are the defenders of virtue…

This funny ceremony usually takes a good twenty minutes and traditionally the garter goes to the very last person who’s put money in when everybody else is skint, usually a man. The ‘winner’ gets the garter and is allowed to untie it using his teeth while the money in the basket goes to the newly weds.