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June 26, 2008
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Reading the marriage market
My review of Rebecca Mead's One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, is up at Knowledge@Wharton.
An excerpt:
... enhanced patterns of consumption may be the most lasting commitment most modern marriages produce. Engaged couples, Mead tells us, registered for $9 billion in gifts in 2006; brides-to-be also spent far more money than their unbetrothed female counterparts. And wives stay the consumerist course: Studies show that 85% of women who register with a particular brand will remain loyal to it for the next 50 years. In other words, the brand loyalty that marketers induce during wedding planning is far more likely to last than the marriage itself.It wasn't long ago that weddings were fairly spartan affairs. In 1939, one-third of all brides did without an engagement ring, a reception or a honeymoon, and 16% of couples got married in clothes they already owned. But in 2006, Americans spent an average of $27,852 on their weddings -- more than twice that of 1990, despite the fact that the wedding industry is what one bridal consultant describes as "the purest example of an inelastic market." The number of weddings has remained relatively constant for decades, and yet the price and scope of weddings have expanded exponentially. Today, the average bride spends $800 on her dress. Collectively, engaged couples spend $4 billion on furniture, $3 billion on housewares and $400 million on tableware every year.
Written in the tradition of charismatic muckrakers who have made their names and their fortunes tracing the cultural damage done by American big business, One Perfect Day tries to do for weddings what Jessica Mitford did for funerals and what Eric Schlosser did for fast food. The not-so-hidden message of One Perfect Day is that weddings reveal the weakness of modern American life. Mead's frequently snarky tone spreads the blame more or less evenly between the money-grubbing callowness of wedding marketers and the dumb willingness of brides and grooms to be exploited by them. Copying the narrative style, humor and ambient anti-capitalism that put The American Way of Death and Fast Food Nation on the map, Mead wants to argue that the wedding industry is a signal example of how the market cheapens American culture by commodifying our most vital traditions.
It's a tidy, if familiar, argument. The trouble is that the facts just don't bear Mead out.
The entire thing is here.
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Comments:
The reviewer argues that her thesis is in error: that what she presents as an American phenomenon is a global one. Incorporated within that point is the idea that there is wretched excess in wedding celebrations.
Have you ever seen the movie The Best Years of Our Lives? Released and set in 1946, it is the story of three war veterens struggling with the return to civilian life. It is an engaging film from a number of angles, among them its depiction of bits of the material culture of the time. A wedding occurs at the very end. The ceremony takes place in a private home; present are the minister, the bride and groom, the immediate families of same, and about a half-dozen friends; the musical accompaniment is a piano piece played by a sibling of one of the couple. The groom makes his promises to the bride, whom he knows well, and makes them in front of her father (and implicitly to her father), whom he also knows well. As long as the rubrics are respected, why anything more elaborate?
I always like your writing, but this piece in particular makes a point that needs to be hammered home again and again: a lot of what's slurred as "Americanization" is just what people anywhere do when they become richer. The United States is the world's richest country and is socially mobile, so such developments happen here first, yes; but that doesn't make them evidence of some sort of intrinsically American shallowness. I just returned to the States after twelve years in Japan, and I can assure you that commuter trains there were always full of ads trying to sell happy couples on the idea of a plasticky fake-Hollywood Western-style ceremony at some wedding chapel or other.
Well, in our capacity as the world's patricians, let's start a trend toward modest weddings.
One's wedding day SHOULDN'T be the happiest day of one's life--we hope that each day will be happier than the next! If you've been married for ten years (or even a year) and your wedding day is STILL the happiest day of your life, you're doing something wrong.
As one who just celebrated her first wedding anniversary in May, I can say that there is a lot of pressure out there from companies, services, and even family to have a big white-cake-and-dress blow-out!
I made my dress (which was navy, red and gold) and the bridesmaids' dresses(we had a theme wedding). I bought our wedding cakes at Trader Joe's which were delicious for the variety and value and made it easier for us to accommodate a serious nut allergy and an aunt with a gluten allergy. Almost every decoration was recycled, including the ribbons left over from my dress-making, which we used for the maypole.
We had the ceremony and party at my husband's VFW post. We also had excellent food, an open bar, and music from my ipod-speaker hook up. The whole shebang cost us about $2,000! Our "honeymoon" consisted of six months living in Slovenia and touring Europe.
I got calls for weeks about how fun the event was and how great it was for my working class family that they didn't have to dress up and figure out which fork to use first. It was very much worth it--a far more personal experience than hiring people to do it for me. And I'll never regret not wearing white!
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