Trick Mirror
Page 29
Andrew is asked about this less often than I am, as it is presumed that marriage is more emotionally exciting for women: within straight couples, weddings are frequently described as the most special day of her life, if not necessarily his. (And of course the questioning is similarly gender-slanted, and far more intrusive, for people who don’t want to have kids.) But still, Andrew gets asked about it often enough. “Doesn’t it bother you?” I asked him recently, after he recounted a couple of phone calls with old friends, one male and one female, both of whom seemed obliquely concerned about our lack of legally binding commitment. “No,” he told me, switching lanes on the Taconic Parkway.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I…don’t really care what people think,” he said.
“Yeah!” I said. “I normally don’t, either!”
“Sure,” he said, audibly bored with this already.
“I usually really don’t care what people think,” I said, getting steamed.
Andrew nodded, his eyes on the road.
“It’s just this one thing,” I said. “It’s like the one thing people say to me that I take personally. And I guess it’s a circular situation—like, people shouldn’t take us not wanting to get married personally, but they do take it personally; otherwise we wouldn’t have to fucking talk about it so much. And it’s like the more I have to talk about it, the more it creates this problem I didn’t have in the first place—like I’ve constructed this spiderweb of answers about why I don’t want to get married that’s probably concealing my actual thoughts about, like, family structure and love. And then I resent the question even more, because it’s stupid and predictable, and so it makes me stupid and predictable, and I have all these, like, meta-narratives in my head, when the fact of the matter is that the whole thing is just transparently ridiculous, starting from the idea that a man just proposes to a woman and she’s supposed to be just lying in wait for the moment he decides he’s ready to commit to a situation where he statistically benefits and she statistically becomes less happy than she would be if she was single, and then she’s the one who has to wear this tacky ring to signify male ownership, and she’s supposed to be excited about it, this new life where doubt becomes this thing you’re supposed to experience in private and certainty becomes the default affect for the entire rest of your life…”
I trailed off because I knew that Andrew had long ago stopped listening to me and started thinking about which nineties wrestling match he was going to watch that evening, and that he, unlike me, had long ago made peace with the desires and decisions that I could not stop explaining, because I, on the topic of weddings, like so many women before me, had gone a little bit insane.
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Here, according to the current advice of the wedding industry, is what a newly engaged person is expected to do in preparation for the event. (Within a straight couple, it is universally assumed—if not actually true, as a rule—that the person who will invest the most energy in this process is the bride-to-be.) Assuming a twelve-month engagement, the affianced is supposed to immediately begin planning an engagement party, looking for a wedding planner (average cost $3,500), choosing a venue (average cost $13,000), and fixing on a date. With eight months to go she’s expected to have created a wedding website (average cost $100—a bargain) and selected her vendors (florals: $2,000; catering: $12,000; music: $2,000). She should have purchased presents to “propose” to her bridesmaids (packages including custom sippy cups and notepads run up to $80, but a “Will You Join My Bride Tribe?” note card is a mere $3.99), assembled a wedding registry (here, thankfully, she can expect to recoup around $4,800), chosen a photographer ($6,000), and shopped for a dress ($1,600, on average, though at the iconic bridal mecca Kleinfeld, the average customer spends $4,500).
With six months to go, the bride should have arranged for the engagement photos ($500), designed invitations and programs and place cards ($750), and figured out where they’ll go on their honeymoon ($4,000). At four months out, she should have gotten the wedding rings ($2,000), purchased gifts for her bridesmaids ($100 per bridesmaid), found gifts for the groomsmen ($100 per groomsman), secured wedding favors ($275), dealt with her wedding showers, and ordered a wedding cake ($450). As the wedding draws near, she needs to apply for a marriage license ($40), do her final gown fittings, test out her wedding shoes, go away for her bachelorette party, prepare the seating chart, send 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 back
lash. 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 traditional. “Jewelers, department stores, fashion designers, bridal consultants, and many others became experts on inventing tradition,” Howard writes, “creating their own versions of the past to legitimize new rituals and help overcome cultural resistance to the lavish affair.” In 1924, Marshall Field’s invented the wedding registry. Retailers began issuing etiquette instructions, insisting that purchasing fine china and engraved invitations was simply the way that things had always been done.
In 1929, the financial crash put a damper on wedding spending. But then, retailers picked up the pitch that “love knows no depression.” Throughout the thirties, newspapers ramped up their wedding coverage, describing gowns and reception menus, giving their readership vicarious thrills. Wallace writes that, by the thirties, brides had become “momentary celebrities.” When the socialite Nancy Beaton married Sir Hugh Smiley in 1933 at Westminster, the dreamy photographs taken by her brother Cecil were all over the papers—shots of Nancy looking slouchy and alluring, her eight bridesmaids linked by one long floral garland, two boys in white satin holding up her veil. “There was so much poverty that we all craved glamour,” an eighty-seven-year-old former dressmaker told the Mirror in 2017, producing her own Beaton-inspired wedding portrait. “It was our chance to feel like a star for the day.” In 1938, a De Beers representative wrote to the ad agency N. W. Ayer & Son, asking if “the use of propaganda in various forms” could juice the engagement-ring market. In 1947, the N. W. Ayer copywriter Frances Gerety coined the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever,” and ever since then, diamond engagement rings have been all but mandatory—an $11 billion industry in America as of 2012.
In the forties, getting married “went from a transition to a kind of apotheosis,” Wallace writes. A wedding no longer marked a woman’s shift from single to married, but rather, it indicated her ascension from ordinary woman to bride and wife. As this glorification was demarcated mainly through purchases, a publishing industry sprang up to tell women what they should buy. In 1934, the first American bridal magazine was founded, under the title So You’re Going to Be Married. (It was later renamed Brides and purchased by Condé Nast.) In 1948, the first weddings-only advice book, The Bride’s Book of Etiquette, gave women guidance that would persist through decades: “It’s your privilege to look as lovely as you know how,” and “You are privileged to make your wedding anything you want it to be,” and “You are privileged to have all eyes center on you.”
Against the backdrop of World War II, weddings took on a new, fierce importance. In 1942, nearly two million Americans got married—an 83 percent increase from a decade before, with two thirds of those brides marrying men who had newly enlisted in the military. The wedding industry capitalized on wartime ceremonies as a symbol of all that was precious about America. “A bride could be forgiven for believing that it was her patriotic duty to insist on a formal wedding, white satin and all,” Wallace writes. The war also gave jewelry companies a lasting boon. Attempts to market engagement rings for men had previously flopped, as such rings were incompatible with the still-prevalent idea that engagement is a thing that men do to women. But in a war context, the male wedding band started to seem logical: with a wedding band, men could cross the ocean wearing a reminder of wife, country, and home. A tradition of bride and groom exchanging rings at the ceremony was rapidly invented. By the fifties, it was as if the double-ring ceremony had existed since the beginning of time.
After the war was over—and along with it, wartime fabric rationing—American wedding dresses grew more elaborate. Synthetic fabrics had become widely available, and full skirts of tulle and organza bloomed. Brides, already young, got even younger. (The average age of first marriage for women was twenty-two at the turn of the twentieth century, but by 1950 it had dropped to 20.3.) By the late fifties, three quarters of women between twenty and twenty-four were married. As the two-decade slump of depression and wartime gave way to peace, prosperity, and a brand-new mass consumer economy, weddings symbolized the beginning of a couple’s catalog-perfect future—the house in the suburbs, the brand-new washing machine, the living room TV.
In the sixties, with social upheaval on the horizon, weddings continued to provide a vision of domestic tradition and stability. Brides adopted a Jackie Kennedy look, wearing pillbox hats, empire waists, and three-quarter 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 aesth
etic, 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 show at your reception ($5,000 for three to seven minutes). The Knot recommends underarm Botox ($1,500 per session). A friend of mine was recently quoted $27,000 for a single day of wedding photography. There are social media consultants for weddings; there are “bridal boot camp” fitness programs all over the nation; there is a growing industry for highly staged, professionally photographed engagements. One day these will probably seem traditional, too.