a music list to her band or DJ, and do a final consultation with her photographer. In the days before the wedding, she passes through the final gauntlet of grooming processes. The night before, there’s the rehearsal dinner. On her wedding day, a year of planning and approximately $30,000 of spending are unleashed over the span of about twelve hours. The next morning, she gets up for the brunch send-off, then goes on her honeymoon, sends her thank-you notes, orders the photo album, and, most likely, starts getting the paperwork together to change her name.
All of this is conducted in the spirit of fun but the name of tradition. There’s a vague idea that, when a woman walks down the aisle wearing several thousand dollars’ worth of white satin, when she pledges her fealty and kisses her new husband in front of 175 people, when her guests trickle back to the tent draped in twinkle lights and find their seats at tables festooned with peonies and then get up in the middle of their frisée salads to thrash around to a Bruno Mars cover—that this joins the bride and groom to an endless line of lovebirds, a golden chain of couples stretching back for centuries, millions of dreamers who threw lavish open-bar celebrations with calligraphy place cards to celebrate spending together forever with their best friend.
But for centuries, weddings were entirely homemade productions, brief and simple ceremonies conducted in private. The vast majority of women in history have gotten married in front of a handful of people, with no reception, in colored dresses that they had worn before and would wear again. In ancient Greece, wealthy brides wore violet or red. In Renaissance Europe, wedding dresses were often blue. In nineteenth-century France and England, lower-class and middle-class women got married in black silk. The white wedding dress didn’t become popular until 1840, when twenty-year-old Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, her cousin, in a formal white gown trimmed with orange blossoms. The event was not photographed—fourteen years later, after the appropriate technology had developed, Victoria and Albert would pose for a reenactment wedding portrait—but British newspapers provided lengthy descriptions of Victoria’s wedding crinolines, her satin slippers, her sapphire brooch, her golden carriage, and her three-hundred-pound wedding cake. The symbolic link between “bride” and “royalty” was forged with Victoria, and would eventually intensify into the idea of a wedding as “a sort of Everywoman’s coronation,” as Holly Brubach wrote in The New Yorker in 1989.
Very soon after Queen Victoria’s wedding, her nuptial decisions were being enshrined as long-standing tradition. In 1849, Godey’s Lady’s Book wrote, “Custom has decided, from the earliest age, that white is the most fitting hue [for brides], whatever may be the material.” The Victorian elite, copying their queen, solidified a wedding template—formal invitations, a processional entrance, flowers and music—with the help of new businesses dedicated exclusively to selling wedding accessories and décor. The rapidly developing consumer marketplace of the late nineteenth century turned weddings into a staging ground for upper-class lifestyle: for a day, you could purchase this lifestyle, even if you weren’t actually upper-class. As middle-class women attempted to create an impression of elite social standing through their weddings, white dresses became more important. In All Dressed in White: The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding, Carol Wallace writes that “a white dress in pristine condition implied its wearer’s employment of an expert laundress, seamstress, and ladies’ maid.”
By the turn of the twentieth century, middle-class families were spending so much money on weddings that there was a cultural backlash. Critics warned against love’s commercialization, and advice writers cautioned families against endangering their finances for a party. In turn, elite women raised the bar in response to middle-class social performances. In Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition, Vicki Howard describes a custom among wealthy families of displaying presents, allowing guests to “peruse…long cloth-covered tables laden with silver, china, jewels, and even furniture….Newspaper announcements recounted society gift viewings, noting the designer or manufacturer of gifts.” A Tennessee bride invited more than fifteen hundred people to her 1908 wedding, and received “seventy silver gifts, fifty-seven glass and crystal items, thirty-one pieces of china, nine sets of linens, and sixty miscellaneous items.”
The growing wedding industry figured out that the best way to get people to accept the new, performative norms of nuptial excess was to tell women—as Godey’s Lady’s Book had done in 1849 with the white wedding dress—that all of this excess was extremely