Rebecca Mead regularly plumbs the depths of modern American culture for the New Yorker magazine. Three years ago she looked around at the $161 billion wedding industry and saw a field ripe for sociological mining.
The result is “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding” (Penguin Press; $24.95), a sharp and insightful study of today’s over-the-top nuptial world, where excess has become the norm and ice sculptures proliferate.
Her book is already being compared to Jessica Mitford’s classic broadside on the funeral industry, “The American Way of Death.” We caught up with Mead in New York and talked about her tome.
How did you research your book?
I wanted to look behind the scenes of the wedding industry, so I went to a conference for wedding planners and a training class for would-be planners. I went to a factory in China that manufactures gowns and I went to the island of Aruba, which changed its laws to make it easier for American tourists to marry there. I went to places like Las Vegas and Gatlinburg, Tenn., another big wedding town. I went all over the country.
What’s fueling the American wedding craze?
The average wedding in the United States costs $28,000 – that’s seven and a half months of the median household income. Part of it’s coming from the fact there are an increasing number of people who’ve decided this is a very lucrative market. It’s well-known among people in the industry that weddings are one occasion in which women especially can be counted on to spend full price. She may shop on sale the rest of her life, but on this day she’ll pay full price. A wedding planner told me there are three occasions in which a person is willing to spend top dollar: birth, marriage and death.
The other thing is weddings don’t mean what they once meant. This is no longer the beginning of your adult life. The average age of a bride today is 25; for grooms it’s 27. You may already live with your spouse-to-be or already be having sex with him or her.
So marriage is not the transitional moment it used to be. People want to feel that some big transition has passed, so the wedding itself becomes the big transition. The wedding itself is the sort of traumatic event that marriage used to be. It’s this enormously demanding production you have to put 16 months into.
What’s behind the whole Bridezilla phenomenon?
I think when a caricature like that grasps the public imagination something bigger is going on, and what it really reveals is a much larger disquiet among many people about the direction weddings are taking. A lot of people think it’s absurd that it costs $28,000 to stage the average American wedding, but they may not know what do about it. So the Bridezilla caricature is a way to siphon off those feelings of disquiet and put them in a safe place so we can all laugh and not have to worry, “Do we really need a pre-wedding barbecue and post-wedding brunch?”
In what way is the wedding craze a reflection of ourselves?
We live in a culture in which we express ourselves through our consumer choices. A celebrity wedding planner told me that he really wants to “empower” women for this important moment through products.
But choosing the right thread count for sheets doesn’t seem like a particularly elevated form of empowerment to me. But it’s a very common perspective in our culture.
You have a serious purpose with this book. It’s not just a lighthearted look at weddings.
I do hope the book is fun to read and has laughs in it. But I do want it to be taken seriously. People talk about weddings as if they’re frivolous, but there are 2.3 million marriages in the United States. It’s the foundation of our social organization.
Reach the writer at stoeltje@express-news.net.
