It’s officially springtime—a good moment to revisit “You’re Getting Married,” Rebecca Mead’s story, from 2003, about the wedding industry. (There’s no exclamation point in the title, which makes it a little ominous.) Mead’s story is a hilarious, disillusioned, and completely unromantic portrait of the wedding salespeople who want you to get married now, and in the most expensive way possible. That, it turns out, is getting harder. Discount wedding shops are proliferating. Brides are getting older, wiser, and less malleable. And the bridal business, as one industry rep explains, is “the purest example of an inelastic market”: “No one yet has found a way to increase the demand. No one ever says, ‘This is a great time to get married—the bridal store is having a sale.’ ”
“You’re Getting Married”—Mead later expanded it into a book, “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding”—is full of fun behind-the-scenes moments in bridal shops and at giant bridal conventions, where Mead sees “enough tiaras to restore every deposed monarchy in history.” (“The endless amount of product appeared, to the untrained eye, deceptively similar and induced, after a few hours, what bridal-store owners call ‘white blindness.’ ”) I was most fascinated, though, by Mead’s account of how the bridal business has adjusted to a higher rate of divorce. Independent bridal businesses, she writes, are focussing more “on so-called nontraditional brides: divorced brides, older brides, and brides with offspring.” Working with first-time brides, salespeople know, but don’t say, that “a satisfied customer may one day be legally unbound”:
“You’re Getting Married” is available to everyone in our archive. Recently, Mead, a staff writer for the magazine, has written about Jane Austen and George Eliot for our Page-Turner blog. (Her book about Eliot, “My Life in Middlemarch,” came out earlier this year.)
