Some of the specific forms that weddings take are new. I think the idea that the wedding is an expression of your individuality or your personality as a couple is a very new idea, especially the notion that the wedding is about you, rather than you joining the ranks of a larger culture.

Originality in weddings is a very strange idea when you think that, in fact, lots of people are getting married. You aren't doing anything particularly unusual in getting married even if you do it underwater. It is still something normal.

And very conformist. It's really one of the most conformist things you can do, and that is partly why people do want their weddings to have some kind of significance. It is an entry into a new social status and new station.

We should talk about your wedding dress experiences because the wedding dress has assumed a very different character from what it once was. It used to be something that people re-wore or changed around or didn't think about as much as we do now. Now you're expected to have a conversion experience when you find the "right" dress.

That's a good analogy. You have this experience - in marketing terms they call is the "Oh, Mommy" moment - where you try on the gown and you see yourself in the mirror and you say "Oh, Mommy!" Your mother is there and you suddenly see yourself as a bride. And that is the moment at which the sales assistant is supposed to say: "Can I get you a tiara and a veil with that?"

The wedding gown is in a way the symbol of the wedding. There are other things that are common at weddings but show up elsewhere. There is no other event where you get to wear a big white gown.

In your book, you visit a bridal gown factory in China. How did you decide to go look at production as part of your analysis?

The book began with an article I wrote for the New Yorker ["You're Getting Married: The Wal-Martization of the bridal business"] about David's Bridal, which is a national chain, and the threat it was presenting to independent bridal stores in the same way that Barnes and Noble did to independent book stores or Home Depot does to independent hardware stores. It was another of those stories, but it had the additional element of it being wedding-related that I found very interesting.

After I had done that story, I thought that it would be fascinating to trace production of one significant wedding element. I wanted to deconstruct the confection of the bridal image. It seemed essential to see how these things were made. And it was very, very eye opening. These migrant workers who make dresses live in factories, in dormitories that are cinderblocks, eight to a room and not at all the way workers in the United States would expect to live. They make $150 per month. And their own married lives are very different from those of the women whose dresses they're making.

I talked to one woman whose job it is to sew stray sequins back on dresses when they fell off and asked what she liked and didn't like about her job. The hardest part of her job she said was that she never got to see her son. He lives with her parents and she sees him once a year when she goes home. When you hear that story the wedding dress becomes less romantic. I mean, the jeans that I'm wearing probably have a similar story but nobody is pretending that my jeans are expressing the apogee of joy and happiness. Weddings are part of the global economy too and it is worth seeing how that works.

Weddings figure so prominently in movies and soap operas and now reality TV shows. When did people start looking at weddings on TV or in movies and want to copy them?

People have wanted celebrity wedding gowns at least since Queen Victoria got married. People wore white gowns because she wore one. One very interesting phenomenon of the celebrity/reality TV notion of weddings is that In Style Weddings magazine introduced the whole idea to an enormous degree in its professional coverage of celebrity weddings. They go in and shoot a celebrity wedding and highlight all the products and wedding planners the celebrities use, and show the reader how to "have" that wedding. That has a big influence on people who want the kind of lifestyle that the rich and famous have for themselves because here is a magazine telling them exactly how to do it. That's a big influence.

The first celebrity wedding I have a clear sense of is that of Diana Spencer and Prince Charles but was there the same sense of wanting to copy?

That dress was knocked off immediately. The wedding dress manufacturers were so thrilled and if you look back at stories of the time everyone is thrilled by the "return to tradition.". Everyone wanted to emulate this wedding, which demonstrated a literal transformation of a young woman into a real princess. A real fairy story.

Now that we're talking about fairy stories, you talk about Walt Disney weddings extensively in your book and Disney is very specific about having princess weddings. You point out that these characters are princesses, not queens. There is an infantilizing quality to this paradigm.

The princess fantasy is such a profound one. It has nothing to do with wanting to be a member of the royal family. It has to do with irresponsibility. It has to do with perpetual youth. It has to do with being perpetually on the brink of some enchanted life, something drawn from fairy stories rather than actual regal history.

It plays into the idea that on your wedding day, even if you're 35, you're an untouched, beauty. Even the pristine white gown substitutes for the virginity of the bride, which is no longer expected and no longer there in so many cases, but the gown has never been worn before by anybody, so at least that's untouched.

The princess thing that happened with Disney is a bit of fabulous marketing. They started marketing this princess line of dolls and movies and now wedding gowns. They started with little girls and marketed Cinderella to them -- and you know it is always Cinderella post-transformation, never Cinderella pre-transformation. Now they have extended that children's product line into an adult product line. Now you can get a Cinderella-themed wedding gown or an Ariel-themed wedding gown.

My favorite thing about the wedding chapel at Disney is that when you're in it, the sightlines down the aisle, in the background if you were in a church there's be a cross at the end, but here there's a view of Cinderella's Castle. One of my favorite moments when I was there was when the person was showing me around explained that if the wedding was a Jewish ceremony, they erect the chuppah so that it doesn't get in the way of the sightlinesÐ you still get the view of the castle. You can be a Jewish princess.

You have a lot to say about the power of tradition as marketing force. The industry uses it to sell things in such a way that even if something isn't traditional, it will be labeled "traditional."

I heard the editor of Modern Bride magazine give a presentation at a conference where she talked about the Echo Boom bride -- Echo Boom brides are the daughters of the Boomer generation and are of age to get married now. She described them as brides who want a "spin" on tradition. They want something that seems sort of traditional, but is actually not traditional at all. I think that the wedding industry is very careful to position innovations as extensions of tradition, because nobody wants to do something at her wedding that 15 years from now is going to look dated and stupid. Everybody wants to do something that looks classic but modern.

So, many objects and practices are marketed with the promise that they are traditional because they imbue your ceremony with a traditional "feel".

Like the unity candle.

And people have no idea where they come from. It is just a very atmospheric, photogenic ritual that is very pleasing to the eye. People want to embrace pick and choose the traditions that appeal to them. I went to a wedding of some friends, neither of whom is Jewish but they danced the hora just because they both like it.

People want the sense of tradition. The wedding is a very traditional thing and it is grounded in historical practice and in ancient ritual. People have been married before and will be married after and there is a sense of permanence. This isn't just a party.

I read a review of your book, which ends with the critic saying that one can't help but feel sorry for the men these women are marrying. Why is all of this marketing directed almost exclusively at women? Why is the wedding so much a woman's game?

It is interesting, isn't it? Increasingly, aspects of the wedding are earmarked for men. And now couples are paying for the wedding themselves more -- rather than the bride's parents. Having said that, today's women have achieved so much and have had so much achieved on their behalf before they grew up. Today's young women in America have grown up with equal rights, equal jobs, equal educations and in some ways have advantages over men. They have been taught to think of themselves as very, very independent women. Then there's this one chance to lapse into a role that is the opposite of everything they've been told. This is the one chance to enact the blushing bride, the virginal princess. It isn't a surprising thing that a young woman who has had all the benefits of feminism would want to enjoy all of the benefits of femininity with out any of the costs. She can look like a virgin bride, but no one expects her to be one.

Critics have observed that your book bears a resemblance to Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death (originally published in 1963 and updated in 2000), and, to a lesser extent, her later book The American Way of Birth (1992). Did you think about her work as you were writing One Perfect Day?

I did. Especially The American Way of Death, which is such a great book. The combination of investigative zeal and wit is just fantastic. And I'm very, very flattered whenever anyone makes the comparison. You know, there are similarities between the wedding business and the funeral business. There are lots of differences too, but these are both times at which the consumer is very emotionally vulnerable and there are many people out there who are more than ready to exploit that vulnerability for their own enrichment. So, some of the issues are the same - though you can count on only having one funeral. "

Previous page

-----------

Buy "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding"

-----------

Elise Mac Adam writes the Indieetiquette column.