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Q & A WITH REBECCA MEAD

A Conversation with Rebecca Mead

You write about our “Bridezilla culture” and the American wedding. Would you explain?

The term “Bridezilla,” which started being widely used around 2000, refers to a bride who has become monstrously obsessed with planning her wedding—with making sure that her chair tie-backs match the lining of the envelopes in which her save-the-date cards have been sent out—and who has become insufferably self-centered in the process. The term clearly rang true for a lot of people: there was a flurry of “Bridezilla” articles, there was a “Bridezilla” book, there was a reality TV show which portrayed real-life brides acting like appalling divas.

I wasn’t interested in telling yet more stories about individual brides gone wild, though. What I wanted to do was to examine the cultural conditions that have lead to the emergence of this character of the so-called Bridezilla, and to understand why the term was so readily embraced. What I discovered is a $161-billion dollar wedding industry, the whole purpose of which is to encourage brides to become obsessive, extravagant, self-centered creatures for the entire period of their engagement, which lasts on average around sixteen or seventeen months. Bridal magazines tell a bride she has to have “wedding colors,” that she might decorate the entryway to her church with topiary obelisks, that she should be wise to choose a “signature hors d’oeuvre.” Hotels propose money-spinning add-ons when they are booking wedding parties, suggesting that the bride might like a horse-drawn carriage to bring her to the receptions. Department stores encourage brides and grooms to treat their wedding registry as an opportunity for licensed greed. Destinations from Disney World to the Sandals resort chain in the Caribbean recognize that weddings are a great way to fill guest rooms.

And all of them operate according to the conventional wisdom that a wedding presents them with the rare opportunity of selling to a consumer who can be relied upon to pay full price. This is one of the few times in a woman’s life when getting a bargain is much less important than getting it right, and the wedding industry does not hesitate to exploit that urge. One wedding-industry consultant I interviewed told me that there are three occasions on which people can be persuaded to spend a lot: birth, marriage, and death. Under this kind of pressure it’s almost surprising that more brides don’t turn into Bridezillas.

What is the relevance of your book’s title—ONE PERFECT DAY?

The wedding industry attempts to make a bride believe that her wedding day is the most important day of her life, and that if she doesn’t do it properly—which is to say, the way that they tell her to do it—she’ll pay the price every day of her married life that follows. There is tremendous pressure upon brides and grooms to micro-manage every detail and to stage-manage every step, in the hope of creating, for a single day, a picture-perfect romantic fantasy.

The bride is told she had better start getting facials as soon as she’s engaged, so that she glows appropriately on the day; that she should lift weights at “bridal boot camp” gym sessions so that her arms look defined in her strapless dress; that she needs to make sure her wedding is an expression of her personality and that of her husband, whether that means ordering a seven-tiered cake ornamented with gold leaf or sending the guests home with gift-wrapped Krispy Kreme donuts. Along with this pressure to create one perfect day is the suggestion that if a bride and groom do decide to cut corners—decide that they can live without some of the growing checklist of items the industry tells them are essential—they’ll live to regret it.

The pressure on brides to ensure that no mistakes are made, no “essential” item forgotten, is very intense. The leading trade association for wedding videographers has a “brides’ guide” on its Web site that tells a bride that she only has “just one chance to be sure all of the emotions, the love and laughter are preserved for you to share and share again”—the implication being that if she fails to take that chance, she’ll have suffered an irretrievable loss. This is very persuasive rhetoric; but brides and grooms should remember that it is a sales pitch.

You traveled across the U.S. and the world to research your book—where did you go and what were some of the most shocking discoveries that you made?

I went all over the place—from wedding-industry conventions and trade shows in Chicago, Las Vegas and Kansas City, to a training session for would-be wedding planners in Connecticut, to honeymoon resorts in the Caribbean, to a wedding dress factory in the Chinese city of Xiamen, to the home of a married pair of wedding-industry consultants in the very wealthy town of Montecito, California, to a tiny town in Wisconsin named Hebron where the pastor had decided she needed to turn the church into a part-time commercial wedding chapel to raise enough funds to keep it alive.

It was always fascinating to go to educational seminars held at conferences and conventions for various wedding professionals, because that’s where one can best see how it is that they really see their clients. I went to one seminar in Las Vegas where a motivational speaker was offering marketing techniques to wedding-dress retailers and advising them on how to close the sale. He told them never to show a bride lower-end dresses first—that way it would be that much harder to persuade the bride to look at a more expensive one later on—and he told them how to make a hard sell after witnessing what he called the “Oh, Mommy” Moment: the moment at which the bride emerges from the dressing room, looks at herself in the mirror mistily, and sighs, “Oh, Mommy.” Later, when I spent some time in a bridal store in Connecticut, I saw sales assistants doing exactly that. This was a store in which the sales assistant would rush up to her colleagues at the cash register making a “W” shape with her fingers whenever she managed to sell a customer on a dress, and an “L” shape when the bride said she was going to continue to shop around.

And the trip to China was an eye-opener: wedding dresses start to look a lot less romantic when you’ve seen how they’re made: mass-produced by five hundred migrant factory workers working a minimum of six days a week for forty cents an hour, and living eight to a room in cramped, cement-floored dormitory bedrooms. One of the most poignant conversations I had during my research was with one of the Chinese factory workers, a woman who had worked there for eleven years, and had seen her ten year old son only once a year during that time because he lived with his grandparents far away in her home city. She was working in the quality control department, and I saw her checking an enormous size thirty gown that was on a tailor’s dummy. She asked me if there were a lot of fat girls in the United States, and marveled at how everything they own must be big—their beds, their furniture. To her, the bride who would be wearing this dress was literally inconceivable; and I imagine the bride who would end up wearing it would have a hard time imagining the life of this factory worker, too.

As you write in ONE PERFECT DAY, most weddings today no longer symbolize a religious experience, a rite of passage, or an initiation into a domestic or sexual relationship. So what is a wedding about these days?

Even though weddings have become more lavish than they ever were, in many ways they have become much less significant events. A wedding is no longer a transition to adulthood: the median age of brides is 26, bridegrooms 27. It is, in many cases, no longer the start of an active sexual life: 69 percent of women and 64 percent of men have already had sexual intercourse by the age of 19. It no longer necessarily marks the departure from the childhood home or beginning of quasi-marital cohabitation: nearly 40 percent of women have lived with an unmarried partner by the age of 24. I’m not suggesting that getting married is meaningless—it’s a very significant change in legal and social status, as anyone trying to get a divorce will tell you. But what I am suggesting is that the actual ceremonial transition of a wedding has been stripped of many of the meanings that it once had, and that as a result, the actual event itself has ballooned in emotional significance. It’s as if all the adjustments, many quite traumatic, that once were an inevitable part of the life of a newlywed—living away from home, learning how to have a sexual relationship, having to support a family—have been transformed into the new, invented traumas of planning a wedding. It’s very interesting that we have come to take it for granted that planning a wedding is going to be a nightmare that lasts for months, costs a fortune, and is going to make you wish at least half a dozen times that you could just elope. I was amazed how many brides and grooms talk about planning the wedding as the first challenge of their marriage: “if we can get through this, we can get through anything,” as one bride described it. It’s as if we need to experience a wedding as a trauma in order to give it significance, to persuade ourselves that it’s more than just a big, expensive party.

Who are the Echo Boom brides and how are they impacting weddings today?

The “Echo Boom” is a demographic term used to describe the children of Baby Boomers, who were born between, roughly, 1979 and 2000. Sociologists and marketers have spent a lot of time studying this group, and characterizing the ways in which they are different from their predecessors. These are the children who spent their formative years being belted into five-point car seats and ferried to soccer games after which everyone takes home a trophy no matter how well they played; they have no memory of the Cold War or life before the Internet; their goals in life include getting into a good college, getting a good job, and getting married. They are a very well-behaved generation, and are also a very brand-conscious generation: they have grown up in a consumer culture that has been catering to them since they were young enough to be buying Cabbage Patch dolls and that is now trying to make sure every single one of them has an iPod.

The wedding industry has taken note of the fact that the oldest members of the Echo Boom are now at marrying age, and has started to focus its attentions on how to appeal to the tastes of this new customer. I heard the “Echo Boom bride” discussed in some detail at a conference I went to for wedding planners, in a keynote address by Antonia van der Meer, the editor of Modern Bride. Van der Meer said that the advent of the Echo Boom bride is good news for those in the business of selling to brides, because these are women who can be expected to spend lavishly on the kind of weddings that wedding magazines like to promote. She said that the Echo Boom bride has somewhat traditional tastes—eighty percent of them want their fathers to give them away—though this bride also wants a “spin on tradition,” like having her pet dog serve as the ring bearer. She wants a wedding that is an expression of her personality, so she’ll do things like have a monogrammed aisle runner. Even the fact that this generation has grown up under the shadow of AIDS has a positive business implication: Van der Meer told her audience that for this generation, “sex can be dangerous, which is good for the marriage industry.”

Why are weddings so important to the members of the Echo Boom? One possible explanation is that these are kids who have seen so much divorce in their parents’ generation that there is a kind of magical thinking at work: they hope that a big, lavish wedding will translate, in the long run, into a greater marital commitment. There is also, I think, a post-feminist reclaiming of an archaic model of femininity, with women who have grown up being told they absolutely equal to boys everywhere from the classroom to the soccer field taking an opportunity to enact a demure and chaste role they have never actually been expected to play in real life, and about which they would be horrified were it suddenly thrust upon them in day-to-day reality. But I think what we are also seeing is this very well-behaved and consumer-oriented generation accepting without question the authority of the wedding industry, which is only too happy to supply the means for Echo Boom brides en masse to “express their individuality.”

What do you mean by your term “traditionalesque?”

The wedding industry uses the idea of “tradition” to market its own lucrative innovations. By “traditionalesque,” I mean a practice that appears to be traditional, or conveys an atmosphere of traditionalism, without actually being a practice or custom that was observed in times past. Another word for the same idea would be pseudo-traditional. I think Americans will be surprised to learn that many of the things that they think of as essential to a wedding were not considered essential at all a generation or two back. The Association of Bridal Consultants, the main trade organization for wedding planners, says that the typical wedding today requires the services of forty-three different professionals—from DJs to confectioners to dress vendors. But a sociological study I found from 1939 discovered that of its sample—middle class, middle American couples—only two thirds of brides had an engagement ring, sixteen percent were married in clothes they already owned rather than a specially procured wedding gown, a third of the couples didn’t have a wedding reception, just a ceremony, and only two thirds of them went on a honeymoon afterwards. So there’s really nothing very traditional about the overblown, professionalized weddings of today.

I also use the term “traditionalesque” to refer to the specific aesthetic—drawn from Victoriana and children’s fairy-tales in equal measure—that seems to prevail in so many of the products and services that comprise the bridal marketplace: the rice that has been specially bred in the shape of hearts, and that crushes underfoot so that it doesn’t choke the birds when used for confetti; the “kissing bell,” to be placed at each guest’s seat as a favor and rung when the couple embrace. One of my favorite wedding products was something called the Heirloom Ornament, a pewter disk embossed with a basket of flowers as a favor for a flower-girl or a cushion for the ring bearer—even though the very definition of an heirloom is something that is handed down through the generations, not bought anew at the bridal store.

Do you feel that your being British allowed you to maintain a certain objectivity in your cultural research into the US?

Because I didn’t grow up in this culture I don’t take for granted things my American peers might take for granted—such as the fact that you can get married at a country club, or, if you want, in a hot air balloon. But I think that my objectivity, or whatever else you might call it, is more to do with temperament than with nationality. I’d have been just as curious about the British wedding industry, if that is what I had chosen to investigate. I’ve been living in the United States for nineteen years, my whole adult life, so it’s not as if the country and the people are strange to me. I hope that my observations are as informed by my experience of living in and traveling in the United States as they are by any native British skepticism.

How are weddings different in the UK versus the US? Are we exporting our Bridezilla culture?

I think we are, and not just to the UK: while I was in China I discovered that more and more Chinese brides are emulating Western wedding traditions, the kind of thing they have seen in romantic Hollywood movies, rather than sticking to the traditional practices of their own culture. One thing that has transformed weddings in the UK is a law that came into effect in 1996 which allowed places such as stately homes to obtain a license for civil wedding ceremonies to be performed on their premises; prior to this all weddings had to be conducted either in a church or at a registry office. But now you can have a ceremony in the ancestral hall of a Duke or a Marquis. As a result of the deregulation, sixty-five percent of all weddings in the UK are now civil ceremonies. It’s been years since I’ve spent much time in England or been to a wedding there, but I am told by friends that it’s become increasingly popular to have a country-weekend wedding—to rent a grand or charming old house in a picturesque part of the countryside and to ape the manners of the landed gentry. All this, of course, is very expensive: One estimate puts the average wedding in the UK at twenty thousand pounds, or roughly forty thousand dollars, which is even higher than the cost of a wedding in the US!