One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding [Paperback]

I'm not married but I've been to 5-6 weddings a year the past few years and am in 2 this June. I have been totally flabbergasted that so many of my friends -- very thoughtful and unconventional in every other aspect -- swallow the most meaningless consumerist drivel when it comes to their weddings. I'm a professional designer and out of all those weddings, I can't remember a single bridesmaid's hairstyle, a single centerpiece, or what any of the cakes looked or tasted like. I'll never eat a wedding dinner that's as well-prepared as any of the San Francisco restaurants that I frequent, and some of the best wedding food I've had was mostly purchased from the Whole Foods deli -- around $1,000 instead of $10,000. What I remember and enjoy is the ceremony and the symbolism of two people getting married, and the fun of celebrating afterwards with friends and family. The fact that my girlfriends spend months and tens of thousands of dollars agonizing over useless stuff completely astounds me. I don't understand why everyone gets so neurotic about it!

What I liked about Mead's book is that she does not seem to be writing from within the dominant paradigm: she doesn't take it for granted that a meaningful wedding requires matching bridesmaid hairstyles or that it's a daring, hand-wringing proposition to (gasp!) let members of the wedding party choose their own shoes. I suppose that I find so much of what brides worry about to be utter nonsense, and I wish there were more voices (besides from the fabulously stodgy Miss Manners) that did not assume that the only way to properly symbolize a marriage is with $10,000 of floral arrangements.

This book is not comforting. The author's tone is dry and you can tell from the language she uses that much of the industry seems over the top to her. She doesn't seem to have a lot of sympathy for the sentimentalism of weddings -- which I think is a well-needed attitude, since so much of the uselessly expensive garbage of the wedding industry is sold using manufactured sentiment. ("But it's the MOST important DAY of your LIFE and of COURSE you NEED custom-printed M&Ms! Because how else will your friends and loved ones know what this day MEANS to you?")

I think some of the reviewers are missing the point. Mead's book is not an instruction manual in helping brides avoid manipulation. It is a sociological examination of how we choose to celebrate marriage and what this says about American culture. I mean the book wasn't shelved in the wedding section at the book store where I purchased it. It was shelved under socoiology.

"One Perfect Day" offers fascinating insight into how the significance of the ceremony has increased as the differences between pre-married life and married life has decreased for many couples.

While looking at this cultural shift, it explores the role of the industry that has sprung up to maintain it. None of the vendors and industry representatives come off looking like bad people. But they are business people and businesses exist to make profit.

I would, however, have liked to see more about the role that parents play in pushing their daughters into the role of bridezilla. In my experience, both parents are usually the primary drivers behind the more, more, more philosophy of wedding planning -- and often push girls who wanted to have a simple wedding into an elaborate affair. I would have especially liked to read an analysis of parental interactions with the bridal industry.

As we stagger into the third millennium, nothing is what it once was. That goes double for weddings. Once, weddings were a celebration of the transition of young people from parental control to their own control under the watchful eye of a beneficent Deity. Now, with the loosening of parental control, with the rise of cohabitation, the decline in church attendance, with the separation of sex and baby-making, and with the rise of a self-oriented consumer culture, the stage has been set for massive change in the way couples view marriage and the ceremony that kicks it off. Actually, the stage is far past set: we are well into Act II.

Author Rebecca Mead could have taken a number of approaches to this new culture. She could have been censorious about its narcissism, or applauded its liberation from its ancient anchors. Instead, she adopts a somewhat bemused, slightly aghast tone that allows her subjects to speak for themselves. And speak they do! Mead's main focus is the wedding industry, which is at an enormously-profitable dream machine. She obtained her information from a close reading of bridal journals, interviews with the industry's visionaries, attending trade shows and visiting sites from Wisconsin to Las Vegas to Aruba to China. What she sees is either refreshingly or depressingly the same all over. Brides (and an increasing number of men) are being sold on the idea that they must stage a dream wedding with all the "traditional" touches that expresses their personal sense of style. And the more money spent the better. Mead makes it clear however, that many of the features considered traditional are not all that old. Only since the 1920s, for instance, have the majority of American brides been married in white silk gowns. Some touches are plain obsessive, like the need to match the attendant's vests to the napkins. Mead calls these faux-ancient touches "traditionalesque"-- shallow imitations of tradition sold by people who have interests at heart other than launching couples into married bliss.

Mead takes us behind the scenes of the wedding industry and unveils the techniques that bridal planners and others use to keep their customers buying, buying, and buying. We meet low-paid Chinese workers laboring for pennies per gown in enormous factory settings. We meet the faux-ordained who tailor their services to their customers' desire for a churchy setting with but a veneer of religiosity. We meet the good people of Disney, that most profit-generating dream machine, who evolved from providing a few shots of the couple with Mickey and Minnie, to providing the entire princess package that includes a rented Cinderella coach ($2500 for a half-hour) with footmen and horses for brides who want to identify with their favorite character. We meet photographers whose repertoire of "iconic" not-so-candid shots varies little from wedding to wedding and videographers who slioce and dice their product into finely-edited packages that the couple must purchase separately and at great cost.

Mead often seems appalled by the crassness, venality and self-indulgence of American weddings, and only seldom finds a group that seems to understand that after a wedding comes marriage, which is more than the opportunity to watch wedding videos. She rhapsodizes over a British couple in Las Vegas, whose entire wedding party (including their parents and children) attended a ceremony in full Elvis regalia. For all the pop silliness of their choice, they seemed to understand the larger ramifications of their life together as a family, and Mead was touched.

Mead's writing is as elegant and dainty as the filigree on a lace doily. Sentence like this often appear, like pearls on a beaded white glove: "After a few hours, I was ovecome by a condition know among retailers as "white blindness," a reeling, dumbfounded state in which it becomes impossible to distinguish between an Empire-waisted gown with alencon lace appliqués and a bias-cut spaghetti strap shift with crystal detail, and in the exhausted grip of which I wanted only to lie down and be quietly smothered by the fluffy weight of it all, like Scott of the Antarctic." You have to admire a writer who can deliver an image like that and link it naughtily to a nearly-obscure historical simile.

Put all of this together and you get a well-written, fascinating and eye-opening look at one of America's most revered yet most abused traditions. After reading this book, one may indeed wonder whether the institution of marriage would be better off without the industry devoted to its initiation.