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My Big, White, Recession-Proof Wedding
Americans hold tight to an expertly-marketed dream
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Kunal Nandy and his fiancée Cara Gardner planned two weddings: one in their native North Carolina, the other in Nundy’s parents’ native India. But as the economy crumbled, so did their parents’ job security.
So Nandy, 27, an MBA candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, and Gardner, 25, a law student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, began scaling back. They trimmed the guest list to 100 from 250, edited the wedding party and put the Indian ceremony on hold.
Still, they plan to drop $30,000 on one afternoon’s celebration.
Could it be that global economic meltdown is really no match for the big white wedding?
“I like to say we are recession resistant,” said Richard Markel, president of the Sacramento, C.A.-based Association of Wedding Professionals International. “You can hold off buying a new car if the old one still runs. For a wedding, once the date is set, you only have until that date to handle everything involved.”
In other words, once those 200 embossed invitations are in the mail, there’s no looking back.
“I think for the most part, weddings are recession proof,” Vané Broussard, editor of the website Brooklyn Brides, agreed in an email interview. “There are brides who think this is a once in a lifetime opportunity that they will do right no matter what the cost.“
Lisa Beverly, 30, is one of those brides. Beverly, who works for the federal government in Washington D.C., plans to spend 17 months of savings on her $30,000 October wedding. Since getting engaged in the spring of 2008, Beverly, who has a mortgage and owes money on her grad school loans, has put in overtime, spent weekends working at marathons and snapped up any paying gigs as a violist she could find.
“In 20 years, when the economy is better, I don’t want to look back and say I wish we’d done it this way or that way,” she said one recent night, on her way home from a viola rehearsal. “In the end, it’s a special day for us.”
And her budget is hardly exorbitant. According to The Wedding Report, a market research group in Phoenix, Ariz., American couples spent an average of $21,814 on their weddings in 2008.
But the $61 billion the industry earned in revenue in 2008 owes much to women like Emily Yezzo. With help from her parents, Yezzo, 26, expects to spend some $60,000 on her Long Island, N.Y. wedding in September 2009.
“I thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance,” said Yezzo, who works in finance in Manhattan. While she has budgeted less for things like favors and even her honeymoon, she won’t cut costs on professional photography, flowers or an open bar.
She has plenty of company, according to wedding industry reports. Wedding vendors seem to be hurting less than other businesses, with 37 percent in a third quarter 2008 survey reporting “good or excellent” sales, and 48 percent “fair or neutral,” according to The Wedding Report. And 58 percent said they’d noticed no drop in consumer spending.
Interestingly, the exchange of vows began to develop into its modern, extravagant form during the Great Depression. As couples and families spent less, and marriage rates declined in the 1930s, businesses launched an aggressive marketing counterattack, to idealize certain features of an expensive wedding. De Beers (now the world’s largest diamond producer) ran ads to persuade brides-to-be that matching diamond engagement and wedding rings were essential. The department store registry was introduced. Brides magazine was founded in 1934.
“Businesses are always looking for ways to make money in times of depression and recession,” explained Vicki Howard, a professor of history at Hartwick College in Oneota, N.Y., and the author of “Brides, Inc., American Weddings and the Business of Tradition.” “There was a sense that weddings were depression proof, and that people would always have to do a minimum of consumption.”
Following World War II, amidst the consumer frenzy of the 1950s, the idea that an elaborate wedding was a necessity, regardless of cost, became ingrained in the national psyche. The diamond ring has become a nearly sacred feature of engagement for the American bride. “By the 40s and 50s, it’s just sort of a cultural cliché that you would get married with a sparkler, the bigger the better,” Howard said.
Howard and other historians of the American wedding attribute this resilience to an allegiance to both tradition and temporality. Couples not only fall for the allure of “once-in-a-lifetime,” but also believe an extravagant wedding is expected, finances be damned.
Said Ohio University history professor Katherine Jellison, author of “It’s Our Day: America’s Love Affair with the White Wedding: “They [weddings] have become a way for the bride and groom to advertise their success, their tastes, and their identity as a couple: ‘See, even in this bad economy I can afford to throw a nice wedding,’ ”
Today's couples seem reluctant to compromise, justifying the expense by arguing that weddings are once-in-a-lifetime affairs.
Photos by Mike Wilkes