By Stacy Lee Kong

Seven years—and one divorce—after Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s 2014 nuptials, flower walls have become become a classic wedding décor choice. Sure, they weren’t exactly new when the then-couple commissioned one of Florence’s oldest flower shops to construct a gigantic multi-wall structure out of gardenias, peonies and tuberose to match Kim’s Givenchy gown, but the OTT wedding, which reportedly cost $2.8 million, certainly played a role in popularizing the flower wall trend for us regular folks. And if you ask Michelle Bilodeau and Karen Cleveland, authors of the just-released The New Wedding Book: A Guide to Ditching All the Rules, that’s part of the problem. When we consume content about the most expensive celebrity weddings, or worse, add stars’ Instagram posts to our Pinterest boards and/or wedding wishlists, we’re buying into a completely unrealistic idea of what weddings should be. Bilodeau and Cleveland chatted with Friday Things about how celebrities encourage the commodification of weddings, why we should care and if COVID is changing the bridal industry.

Is there a celebrity wedding that stands out to each of you as particularly over-the-top? What stood out to you about the way that wedding was covered and why?  

Michelle Bilodeau: For me there are really three that stand out for different reasons. Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, obviously. It really played into the whole fairytale of marrying a prince, didn’t it? Kim and Kanye’s wedding was so over the top. Lana Del Rey and Andrea Bocelli performed, they paid upwards of $50,000 for their floral wall backdrop, her Givenchy dress was $500,000. It was OTT times 1,000. And lastly, Zoe Kravitz. Her and her partner have since split, but her Alexander Wang dress was so unique and special.   

Karen Cleveland: A celebrity wedding that stands out for me because it is so low-key is that of Emily Ratajkowski to Sebastian Bear-McClard. It was a simple courthouse wedding, years before the pandemic, and Emily wore this really chic mustard-yellow suit and a black hat. They hammered and blow-torched their own rings, which is so badass. 

Why do you think celebrity weddings are so fascinating?  

MB: I think they’re super interesting to us because they really play into the fantasy of, “If I had all the money in the world, what would my wedding be like?” And that’s a fun game to play, until you look at your finances. So, it should be seen as just that, a game. We need to come back down to earth a little bit when it comes to weddings. We can still have super special events, without spending millions of dollars.   

KC: Weddings and celebrities are both steeped in perfection. And for a lot of couples in general, and women in particular, your wedding day is your moment of celebrity. For a day, you get the hair, the make up, the photography, all the attention on you. I can see the throughline of why we find celebrity weddings so seductive, and wanting a piece of that action. But, what we get into in the book is the reckoning that celebrities, who ironically can afford every lavish detail for their weddings, often get things comp'ed in exchange for visibility or alignment for their weddings. So, we consume these photos, and over time, they set this ridiculous standard for which people strive, and it weirdly normalizes their over the topness.  

How do celebrities (and I guess internet culture at large) help drive the commodification of weddings?  

MB: They are a huge driver of it. A celeb wedding dress can set the trend for wedding dresses one to two even three years out. A floral wall has become a huge trend in weddings since Kim and Kanye got married in 2014. Social media is similar, but with social media, there’s this added pressure to have things picture perfect on your wedding day, which is another thing that we just don’t need to stress about.   

KC: I think the cultural obsession we have with weddings is misplaced. We want to see what they wore, what the ring looks like, what were the flowers, blah blah, but we don't mourn if that marriage ends in a few years. It contributes to this over-investment in weddings, while we pay little attention to marriages. It is sad and bums me out. The message to couples is that what matters is how your wedding looks and the success of your marriage is secondary to that. Social media perpetuates that, too, that weddings are things to look at. 

Why does it matter that weddings are being commodified?  

MB: It is adding too much stress to a day that should be about the couple. It should be a celebration of love, not an event that causes you to question your relationships with family and friends. And it shouldn’t be cause for you to change your relationship with money—it can help you look at it, and hopefully help you develop a healthy relationship with money, but you should throw your budget out the window. And yet, we’ve heard time and again that relationship squabbles, between them and family and friends, happen all the time to couples who are tying the knot.   

KC: I mean, you can't blame the wedding industry for simply rising to meet that demands of consumers, but at a certain point, weddings have gotten untenable. The economics for couples starting their lives together are very different today than they were decades ago. The cost of housing has gone up something like threefold what our incomes have in ten years in Canada, so couples are making hard choices like, 'do we want to drop $30k on a six hour party? Or do we want to try to buy a condo', for example.  

What's also problematic about the commodification of weddings is what is commodified, and that's often women. The wedding industry is synonymous with the bridal industry: not couples, not grooms. So, there's this massive machine that is selling women this fantasy of being a bride, on being thin, looking the part, springing for lash extensions, you name it. There is high-grade pressure on women to transform into a bride, regardless of who she is, her background  or what her values are. In the book, we tell the stories of people who crash dieted, did the bridal bootcamps, asked their friends to get Botox, tanned, bleached their skin and even got a feeding tube inserted to lose those last few pounds, all for what....to measure up to ....? It isn't very romantic. And likewise, we tell a lot of stories of people who are like, 'hard pass. None of that is for me'. We really wanted to call out and celebrate those stories. 

Has COVID made a dent in the wedding industrial complex, both for celebrities and for regular folks? And if so, do you think it'll last?  

MB: It definitely has. It is estimated that in 2020, the wedding industry was down quite a bit. 21% of couples postponed their weddings to later in 2020, and 42% were moved entirely to 2021, according to The Wedding Report. Also, 46% of couples cut their wedding budgets by 31%. That’s a huge impact to a 75+ billion dollar industry. The Wedding Report is predicting a spike in wedding spending in 2021. After the year we’ve had, people will definitely want something to celebrate. However, we do think that the pandemic will help people focus more on what matters in terms of weddings, and that in turn will help people focus on not overspending.   

KC: Without question, the pandemic has changed weddings and for the better. COVID has forced couples to explore a different path, which is a return to meaningful, smaller events. This past year, so many people lost their income (or worse, a loved one) and weddings were forced to be tiny. Pandemic weddings are high on romance and low on pomp.  

Because of the pandemic, people's finances got rocked, too, and there's a respect for intergenerational wellness and financial health. I think there was this holdover that 'well, our parents can help us pay for our wedding'. And this past year, not only did a ton of younger people lose their jobs but, so did their parents. Let's be honest: someone is picking up that bill for the wedding. Do you want to go into debt for your wedding? Do you want your parents to go into debt for your wedding? I think all of those factors are going to ground events in being smaller, more intimate, more special—and that's a really great antidote to this pressure to have an over-the-top wedding. 

What's the solution to the commodification of weddings? Is there one?

MB: The solution is doing things for you and your partner, within your means, not because it’s something we’re being force-fed by the wedding industrial complex.   

KC: The sector will adapt to meet the needs of consumers. So, over time, if couples demand change—be it for weddings that are more diverse, more inclusive of different cultures, more environmentally sustainable, more welcoming for those with disabilities, more feminist, whatever is important to them, it's harder for the wedding industry to continue to be so homogeneous. That will drive a pressure for the industry to respond to what couples want, versus couples trying to find themselves in the wedding monolith.   

Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think I should know?  

KC: We wrote this book not because we're anti-wedding. WE LOVE WEDDINGS and we're hopeless, die-hard romantics. We wrote this book because when we planned our weddings, it felt like there was very much a script that you follow, and that script didn't feel like us. It didn't reflect our values, who we are as individuals or the foundation on which we wanted our marriages to be built. That's what underpins this book: the understanding that there are no wedding police, no one is going to come after you for straying from the script. Toss the script.