Synopsis | Reviews | Praise | Research | Q & A with Rebecca Mead

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Publishers Weekly
In its nascence in the American lexicon, the term "Bridezilla" has inspired articles, reality television and watercooler tales of brides gone mad. This phenomenon piqued New Yorker staff writer Mead's interest, sending her on a three-year investigation of the current American wedding and the $161-billion industry that spawned it. "Blaming the bride," she writes, "wasn't an adequate explanation for what seemed to be underlying the concept of the Bridezilla: that weddings themselves were out of control." Interviewing wedding industry professionals and attending weddings in Las Vegas, Disney World, Aruba and a wedding town in Tennessee, Mead ventures beyond the tulle curtain to reveal moneymaking ploys designed around our most profound fears as well as our headiest happily-ever-after fantasies. Goods and services providers alter marital traditions—and even invent new ones—to feed their bottom line. Stores vie for bridal registry business in hopes of gaining lifelong customers. Women swoon for what retailers call "the 'Oh, Mommy' moment" in boutique fitting rooms—an unsettling contrast to the Chinese bridal gown factory workers who make them possible, sleeping eight to a room and scraping by on 30 cents an hour. Part investigative journalism, part social commentary, Mead's wry, insightful work offers an illuminating glimpse at the ugly underbelly of our Bridezilla culture.

Booklist
Reminiscent of Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death (1963), although written in a considerably lighter vein, this eye-opening book looks at weddings not merely as unions of two people who are in love with each other but also as products of an industry that is in love with money. Mead begins with a fascinating overview of the Bridezilla phenomenon, a recent coinage that quickly entered the language as a term to describe an excessively self-absorbed, tyrannical, my-way-or-the-highway bride-to-be (the term has inspired books and reality TV shows). In 2006, Mead notes, the wedding industry took in about $161 billion. Magazine publishers, she explains, now add value for their advertisers by holding seminars on how to get married (featuring displays of wedding-related products, from fashion to cookery to linens). Similarly, bridal registries—the first was established in 1924—have become crucial sources of revenue for department stores and specialty shops. Once-peripheral features, such as wedding planning and videography, are fast becoming industries unto themselves. And on and on. Weddings, Mead argues in this revealing mix of popular history and social criticism, are reflections of who we are, and the wedding industry is a reflection of the culture we have created: ruthlessly organized, product-oriented, fiscally irresponsible, but still, somehow, retaining a bit of romance.

International Herald Tribune
A Sharp, Stinging Look at the American Way of Weddings
by Holly Brubach

In her sharply observed One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, Rebecca Mead does for the matrimony industry what Jessica Mitford in The American Way of Death did for the funeral business.

It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Mead, like Mitford, is not American but English. Edward Hall, the American anthropologist who specialized in cultural differences and advised the U.S. State Department during the 1950s, once defined culture as the things you take for granted. We take for granted the rites surrounding marriage and death. It takes an outsider to call attention to the absurdities inherent in American behavior.

If readers of Mitford's book inevitably conclude that they want to be cremated, Mead's readers, I predict, will come away determined to elope. Gone, it appears, are the days when a couple could simply hire a minister, an organist, a caterer and a disc jockey and recruit a friend to snap the pictures.

According to a founder of the Association of Bridal Consultants, 43 businesses get involved in staging what she calls "today's standard wedding" in the United States, marketing their services as indispensable preparations for the most important day in a woman's life.

How far in advance should the bride start getting facials? "As soon as she is engaged" is the helpful counsel from one authority at Brides magazine.

The experience of commissioning and staging a wedding now appears more suitable training for a career as, say, Reese Witherspoon, an actress who produces and stars in her own movies, than as groundwork for a lifelong partnership. Just reading about it is exhausting.

What prompts couples—women, in particular, since they're the ones on whom the burden of reply cards and chair covers and seating charts ordinarily falls—to sign up for what several brides characterize as a steady diet of stress?

Mead ascribes this willingness, even eagerness, to play along with the most arcane aspects of staging a celebration to couples (again, one imagines, brides in particular) hedging their bets, hoping that a lavish wedding will provide the solid start of a lasting marriage.

"No one can blame the younger generation for seeking talismanic protection against committing the mistakes of their elders," she writes, "and the fantasy that the future of a marriage might be secured by the conduct of a wedding is a poignant and persuasive one."

If weddings today routinely invoke the past, it seems an attempt to situate the couple in some historical limbo, safe from contemporary misgivings about lifelong compatibility and the day-to-day compromises that commitment entails. Mead coins the cumbersome term "traditionalesque" as a label for the prevailing style, which she defines as "a bastardized aesthetic derived from Victoriana and filtered through the lens of the romance novel and the Disney cartoon."

Women of my mother's generation used to tune in to a popular radio and television show called "Queen for a Day," in which one down-and-out contestant was awarded the crown, draped in a sable-trimmed red velvet robe and granted one wish, thereby reinforcing in audiences the cherished hope that life is a lottery and tomorrow just might be the day when you hit the jackpot.

Americans who watch average people, no better-looking or more intelligent than ourselves, catapulted into the ranks of celebrity are left waiting for the moment when our own lives will change, when we will break through the tedium of our own circumstances and embark on the fabulous destiny to which we feel entitled.

Last year, the tab for the average wedding in America came to $27,852. Mead quotes the president of the Association of Bridal Consultants: "It seems like the less money people have, the more they spend."

Surely the bloated scale of today's celebrations has as much to do with the Princess Complex, which seems to have reached epidemic proportions among American females, as it does with crossed fingers and hopes against hope. Recent reports of young girls' buying en masse into products and parties with a princess theme find their adult equivalent here, and what starts out harmless and even charming in childhood comes across in adults as alarming and grotesque.

Mead features one bride who opted for Cinderella place cards, plastic "glass slippers" as place-card holders, Cinderella invitations and save-the-date cards, a Disney song after cutting the cake, Cinderella and Prince toasting flutes, and a Cinderella and Prince etched hurricane lamp for the table. Cinderella's Coach, Mead tells us, which rents for $2,500 per ceremony, "is one of the most coveted items available through Disney's Fairytale Weddings & Honeymoons program."

What has become of Americans as a society, that orchestrating a wedding has turned into such an aggressive, obsessive, competitive pursuit? Why the compulsive flight into fantasy? Have Americans gorged on too many fairy tales? And when did a wedding turn into a party for and about the bride?

Throughout Mead's account of brides in the throes of prenuptial planning, my mind kept wandering to their fiancés.

Consider the woman with the Cinderella invitations, the Cinderella hurricane lamp, the glass slipper place-card holders. What's going through the groom's mind? Is he thrilled to be cast in the role of the Prince? Is he congratulating himself on having won the fair heroine?

Or is he wondering what he's gotten himself into and whether his wife will grow up anytime soon? Is he asking himself how hard it's going to be to make a princess happy? I sure hope he had fun at his stag party.