The marriage industrial complex

Rebecca Mead, author of a new book on the out-of-control American wedding, discusses Disney brides, formalwear for pets, and whether hiring a wedding planner is ever a feminist act.

By Hannah Wallace

Read more: Love, Feminism, Money, Marriage, Weddings, Life

May 21, 2007 | If you've been to a wedding in the past few years (or have staged one yourself), you won't be surprised to learn that weddings are a booming business. Last year, the average American ceremony cost $27,852; the average dress, $1,025. If such figures don't shock you (and keep in mind, the numbers are far higher in pricey cities such as New York and San Francisco), maybe a few comparisons will: The median household income in the United States is $46,326 and a 5 percent down payment on a $500,000 condominium is $25,000.

Even more disturbing, perhaps, is how quickly and effortlessly the $161 billion wedding industry seems to have insinuated itself into every corner of the culture -- and how impossible it has become to escape its trappings, from diamond rings (which, before the 1930s, were not a de facto wedding accouterment) to wedding planners, bridal registries and glossy magazines that perpetuate weddings as fairy-tale fantasies. In fact, the extravagant, over-the-top gala has become such a fixture of American life that most people don't question it anymore. And why should they? If marriage is supposed to be a sacred undertaking that happens once in a lifetime, why shouldn't you do it wearing Vera Wang?

That's the thorny dilemma reporter Rebecca Mead confronts in her new wedding industry exposé, "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding." Mead's obsession with the marketing of weddings began three years ago, when she wrote a story for the New Yorker about discount bridal dress chain David's Bridal. While researching "One Perfect Day," Mead made her way from Walt Disney World's Wedding Pavilion (where brides regularly spend $2,500 extra to rent the Cinderella Coach) to the ersatz wedding town of Hebron, Mich., and a crowded bridal dress factory in Xiamen, China. She also attended trade shows, hung out with newly minted bridal consultants and trailed a celebrity wedding planner, a "multifaith" minister and a wedding dress magnate -- all to illustrate the ways in which the industry preys upon both a bride's hopes and her insecurities by aggressively marketing products that promise to make her day "perfect."

The result is a concise but searing skewering of the marriage marketplace and the "Bridezilla" culture that has sprung up around it, written in the spirit of the great muck-raking journalists. And in the midst of reporting her book, Mead showed her personal rejection of elaborate nuptial extravaganzas by quietly having her own wedding at a New York City courthouse. She and her betrothed dressed in everyday office attire and, a few days later, celebrated with friends and family at their Brooklyn home.

Salon sat down with Mead recently to discuss Cinderella brides, the changing meaning of the honeymoon and whether a feminist wedding planner is an oxymoron.

At the beginning of "One Perfect Day" you point out that marriage used to signal that you were becoming an adult or herald the start of your sex life as well as your departure from the family home. Now that we do all of these things before marriage, do you think it's the extravagant ceremony itself that has become the rite of passage?

Precisely. It's amazing the number of people who say, "If we can get through this, we can get through anything," or "This is the first challenge of our married life together." And you think, "Jeez, you have no idea what you've got coming!" It's not like it's a death in the family or anything like that.

This is sort of a psychoanalytic argument, but I think that people need for a wedding to feel traumatic. Because it used to be a traumatic transition. You left your parental home. If you look at documents -- diaries or letters from women in 19th century rural America getting married -- leaving their mother was a very, very big deal. Wrenching away from your birth family was a very big deal. Now, most of us have done that years earlier. And to some degree, even those people who are living at home are still leading more independent lives.

But I think that people still need to feel that this transition is a viscerally affecting experience. Because being married is very different from not being married. I don't mean that if you get married tomorrow, suddenly your life is going to be different the next day. But it is a different commitment, as anybody who is going through a divorce will tell you. It's much harder to break up a marriage than it is to break up a nonmarital partnership. So I think people need the sense of "Wow! Something really big has just happened."

The purpose of honeymoons has evolved in a similar way, hasn't it? You point out that they used to be a chance to visit the bride's relatives and friends, and then they were all about sexual intimacy ...

Yeah, and now, if you talk to any couples or look on the Knot.com, you see that people perceive the honeymoon as a time when they can recover from the stress of planning the wedding!

It's brilliant from a business perspective -- it's as if the wedding industry and the honeymoon industry are in sync -- the wedding industry is like, "OK, we're going to wear them out and then send them to you."

Right, and you'll make a fortune off giving them spa treatments!

How did you become interested in writing about the wedding industry?

It wasn't my own wedding -- I got married long after I started the book. It just seemed like a subject that had not been done. I began the book with an article for the New Yorker about David's Bridal. I loved the story because it was about the way in which small mom and pop stores were being taken over, threatened, by a Goliath; only in this case, Goliath won. And those are always great stories.

Early in the book, you talk about an epiphany you had while attending a Business of Brides conference: that the emergence of extravagant weddings is not a repudiation of feminist principles but, in fact, a direct consequence of them. Can you explain what you mean by that?

It's interesting. It looks like a contradiction -- women in their 30s and younger getting dressed up like princesses to get married. But in a way, it's not, because it all has to do with the professionalization of weddings. Forty years ago your mother would've been planning your wedding, or your aunt would've been making you a cake, and your uncle would've been taking the photographs. There were big weddings then, but nowhere close to what it is now.

Weddings were traditionally part of the work of women within the household. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Arlie Hochschild, who wrote "The Second Shift." But you know, women used to make their own dresses, cook, take care of the kids, and now we outsource all of this: childcare, cooking, even getting your eyebrows done or getting your legs waxed. Nobody does their own if they can afford not to -- or even if they can't!

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