Gazing upon the Custom Liquid booth at the Great Bridal Expo, where the half-liter water bottles picture a bride and a groom on the label ($48 a case, plus shipping), Rebecca Mead announced, “This is a new one on me.”
Mead has spent three years attending bridal exhibitions, interviewing wedding planners, even visiting a wedding dress factory in China and a honeymoon factory in Aruba for her book, “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding,” which came out this week, and so finding a corner of the industry that she hadn’t already seen was worth noting.
“Every season there’s something new,” she said. The industry is constantly adding novelties and inventing rituals to part a bride and her money. The giant man-and-fiance-eating wedding market is endlessly expanding.
Then again, so are books about weddings and brides: memoirs, essay collections, survival guides and planners for brides, grooms, mothers, mothers-in-law, Southerners, Jews, African-Americans — as well as cultural histories and social commentaries, the categories in which Mead, a staff writer at The New Yorker, includes herself.
“I’m not interested in Bridezilla, the crazy exception,” Mead said after spotting a “Don’t be a Bridezilla” sign advertising a wedding-planning Web site at a recent bridal expo in Midtown. “They’re funny, but not very illuminating. I’m interested in ordinary brides, not exaggerated monster creatures.”
Trauma substitution
Still, as she said later, the fact that the Bridezilla caricature has captured the popular imagination suggests a larger phenomenon. “Getting married is still a big thing, but the transition is not the traumatic thing that it used to be,” she said. “I think there is a way in which the trauma of the wedding planning is substituting for the trauma of the newlywed. People feel they have to go through some type of traumatic experience to show that they’re married, to show that there is something different about them.”
Nor should we forget, she added, that “this is a consumerist society” and that the marketplace “intervenes in things that we like to think have nothing to do with money.”
The expo is a difficult place to imagine money having nothing to do with marrying. Hundreds of brides-to-be, a few with grooms in tow, pass booths set up like stalls in a pastel-colored Turkish souk as the proprietors try to lure them in with a pitch: “Do you want to register?” “Do you want to enter to win? We’re giving away a Coach bag,” “We’re giving away $1,000,” an Anolon pan, a free yearlong membership, $35 off, a four-day trip and so on.
Women wear purple stickers with the letters “VIB”; the men’s are green with “VIG,” meaning Very Important Bride and Very Important Groom, Mead explained, “so exhibitors won’t have to ask ‘who’s the bride?’ ” as they do every time the stickerless Mead pauses.
“Don’t fill out the cards,” she warns her soon-to-be-married publicist from Penguin Press. “You’ll get dozens of wedding vendors calling you, writing you, e-mailing you. This is a very big bridal market. The whole thing is a way of getting customers.”
Mead got married while she was writing the book, in a small civil ceremony at a Manhattan courthouse on a Thursday afternoon. The next Sunday she and her husband, George Prochnik, held a party for 85 at their home in Brooklyn. She declined to specify the cost, saying only that it was “much, much, much, much less” than the $27,000-plus average the industry likes to cite.
A push to record memories
With a practiced eye, she walks the expo aisles, past a 4 1/2 -foot tower of calla lilies ($700); a long, white buttonless tuxedo with a mandarin collar ($119 to rent); and ads for a portable toilet with oak cabinetry, marbled sinks and a black-tie attendant ($3,495 for eight hours). “You never knew a potty could be so nice,” the saleswoman says, handing out emery boards imprinted with “Bobby’s Portable Restrooms.”
There are lots of photographers and videographers. Competition between them is fierce, Mead said, adding that the idea both camps are pushing is that if you don’t record it, “your happiness will be lost, your memories will be lost.”
At the American Laser Center booth, women in white coats explain cellulite-reduction therapy and hair removal. (Both are popular now, Mead notes.) Romanta Therapy promotes the “passion party,” at which you can sample products and play games like pass-the-vibrator. (“It’s on,” the sales rep explains.)
A baker hands out tiny chocolate cupcakes with white frosting and sprinkles. Next door is Smart for Life, a weight-loss program. Dr. Gregory Skinner has a wedding special on teeth whitening ($399). On his table is a set of false teeth next to an oversize martini glass filled with chocolate kisses. “This is a kiss from me,” Skinner says, handing out a candy.
People are savvy consumers, Mead said, but a wedding is “probably the one time in her life that a bride will pay full price.”
And not just the brides. Jason Werner is working at the drugstore-style photo booth ($1,595 for four hours, $1,695 for five, which includes an attendant in case “grandma needs help getting into the booth,” he says). “I’m getting married Aug. 18,” Werner says, and (of course) a photo booth will be at his Long Island wedding, as well as a band that the couple are bringing up from New Orleans. “If you really want something, this is the day to do it,” he says.
