sleeves. In the seventies, the wedding industry adapted to accommodate the counterculture, catering to a new wave of young couples who wished to avoid the previous generation’s aesthetic. It was in this decade—with the so-called narcissism epidemic and the rise of what Tom Wolfe called the “Me Generation”—that the idea of the wedding as a form of deeply individual expression took hold. Men wore colored tuxes. Bianca Jagger got married in an Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking jacket. “Extremely quirky weddings got publicity,” writes Wallace, “like the couples who married on skis or underwater or stark naked in Times Square.”
Then, in the eighties, the pendulum swung back. “For many of us who stood on the beach in the nineteen-seventies and looked on while the maid of honor sang ‘Both Sides Now’ and the barefoot couple plighted its troth with excerpts from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet,” Holly Brubach wrote in The New Yorker, “the news that in the eighties weddings seemed to be taking a turn for the more traditional came as a relief. Who could have foreseen that the results would often be, in their way, no less preposterous?” She noted the odd “pastiche of elements from Dior’s New Look and Victorian fashion” that had taken over bridal attire in the years following Diana Spencer’s televised royal wedding bonanza. Like Diana’s dress, the eighties wedding look ran counter to fashion, with full skirts, mutton sleeves, bustles and bows.
In the nineties, with the rise of Vera Wang and the ascendancy of Calvin Klein minimalism, wedding dresses realigned with trends. Brides wore white slip dresses with spaghetti straps, à la Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy—a Calvin Klein publicist before her marriage, and a silky blond exemplar of East Coast good taste. From the West Coast, a Playboy Mansion licentiousness entered the bridal aesthetic. Cindy Crawford got married on the beach in a minidress that resembled lingerie. Consumerist raunch—Girls Gone Wild, MTV Spring Break—came crashing into the industry. Brides-to-be insisted on bachelorette parties involving hot-cop strippers and penis straws.
In the aughts, weddings took on the high-res bloat of reality television. Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? aired, disastrously, in February 2000. Betrothal was the end goal of the Bachelor franchise, the raw material for the assembly line of Say Yes to the Dress. The aerial-scale wedding celebration—the type so preposterous that it required subsidization by the TV network that would broadcast it—entered the realm with Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter’s 2003 Bachelorette wedding, which cost $3.77 million and attracted 17 million viewers on ABC. (Rehn and Sutter were paid $1 million for the TV rights.) And then, in the 2010s, came the elaborate monoculture of Pinterest, the image-sharing social network that produced a new, ubiquitous, “traditional” wedding aesthetic, teaching couples to manufacture a sense of authenticity through rented barns, wildflowers in mason jars, old convertibles or rusty pickup trucks.
The industry churns on today, riding high and manic in the wake of two recent bride coronations: Kate Middleton, rigorously thin in her Alexander McQueen princess gown ($434,000), and Meghan Markle, doe-eyed in boatneck Givenchy ($265,000). Despite the economic precarity that has threatened the American population since the 2008 recession, weddings have only been getting more expensive. They remain an industry-dictated “theme park of upward mobility,” as Naomi Wolf put it: a world defined by the illusion that everyone within it is upper-middle class.
This illusion is formalized further by the social media era, in which clothes and backdrops are routinely sought out and paid for in large part to broadcast the impression of cachet. Weddings have long existed in this sort of performative ecosystem: “A great set of wedding photographs can be called upon to justify all the expense that preceded them, and the anticipation of acquiring a good set of photographs can also encourage that expense in the first place,” Rebecca Mead writes in One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. Today, Instagram encourages people to treat life itself like a wedding—like a production engineered to be witnessed and admired by an audience. It has become common for people, especially women, to interact with themselves as if they were famous all the time. Under these circumstances, the vision of the bride as celebrity princess has hardened into something like a rule. Expectations of bridal beauty have collided with the wellness industry and produced a massive dark star of obligation. Brides recommends that its affianced readers take healing naps in salt chambers and cleanse themselves with crystals. Martha Stewart Weddings prices out a fireworks