On paper, the couple seemed perfect, ticking all the boxes for their wedding to be featured in Vogue: career, family history, luxury photographer and planner, even a couture gown. But after reviewing their submission, the magazine wasn’t interested in moving forward. The couple lodged an appeal: Could they submit different images? What would move the needle? Vogue told them it just wasn’t a fit. “There are definitely couples who try pitching their weddings through multiple avenues — one of us will reject it, so they will try another editor, without perhaps realizing that we are all discussing the weddings among us,” says a Vogue staffer. “We’ve had brides offer to send us gifts to help grease the wheels.”

Wheel-greasing is just the start of it. The competition to get weddings featured on Vogue’s website has grown so fierce that fashion publicists are building whole arms of their business around the process. “Bridal was always this stepsister in the fashion industry — it’s like fashion forgot that they could make money on it,” says Savannah Engel, who handled the PR for oil heiress Ivy Getty’s wedding. “There are three things that can always make money: porn, death, and weddings.” Under Engel, who has been a bridesmaid 39 times, the process can take ten months or more and involves helping couples find the right designers, photographers, and other vendors to ensure that the event is fit for publication. “We’re thinking about it from the angle of public perception,” Engel said. “We’re not thinking about it from the angle of the intimacy of a couple.” Most recently, Engel worked on the wedding of the high-profile Nigerian couple Temi Otedola and Mr Eazi, a two-year project that entailed ceremonies in Monaco, Dubai, and Iceland.

Wealthy people have always used their weddings to display their riches and influence. What’s curious is that, now more than ever, people like Engel’s clients want to display those qualities in Vogue, whose cultural power, along with that of other legacy-media brands, has long been waning. A younger generation of women, after all, are turning less to vogue.com than to fashion newsletters or their preferred influencer’s Instagram Story to find out what to buy and who to imitate.

And yet, at a moment when anyone with a large social-media following is a microcelebrity, it’s become more difficult to measure what it means to be a person of note. “If you’re just Jane Doe influencer, being in Vogue is the only opportunity for you to really be cosigned by something that’s an arbiter of taste,” says a publicist who has worked with top bridal designers. And for many, their only opportunity to be in Vogue is through their wedding. “Vogue matters less and less in other respects, but for weddings, it’s different,” says another publicist. “I think a particular kind of woman gets almost feral in their need to be acknowledged by Vogue. It’s going to live online forever, and people want to be able to show their kids and grandkids, ‘Look, Mommy was in Vogue.”’

“The new social currency is much more about showing that you’re a creative person than that you are a rich person,” says luxury-event planner Marcy Blum, whose clients have included Bill Gates’s daughter and LeBron James. And Vogue offers an opportunity to showcase that creativity in a controlled environment. “The only thing you can compare it to is home coverage, which is still a very vibrant part of the media landscape. It’s safe, for one; it’s highly visible; and it’s super-curated,” says publicist Kaitlin Phillips, who notes that couples often choose which photos they submit to Vogue. “Control over your image is so hard now. With the New York Times, you don’t get photo approval. I always tell clients that the Times photographers are like war reporters: They will shoot you with a double chin no matter what because they want to show you in action.”

“At the end of the day — and you can make fun of this, but it is what it is — Vogue ‘Weddings’ is a news-breaking venture for us,” says Chloe Malle, who succeeded Anna Wintour as Vogue’s editor last year. “We are turning it around in a military-operation way. Venus Williams gets married the weekend before Christmas, it’s up on Monday. No one else has seen the pictures.” Malle has been a driving force in expanding Vogue’s wedding coverage and has written up some of the biggest ones herself, including the weddings of Naomi Biden and Lauren Sánchez Bezos. “It’s not unusual that a wedding is our top-performing story of the week,” says Malle. In addition to attracting “some of the most time spent on our articles” — over 17 million minutes globally last year — wedding content, she says, is “a very appealing and popular destination for digital display for advertising partners,” particularly fine-jewelry brands.

Vogue has long covered the weddings of presidents and celebrities in its print pages, but it wasn’t until 2011, around the time of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, that the digital feature — now the franchise’s primary format — came to be. It was the brainchild of Alexandra Macon, then the managing editor of vogue.com, who wanted to cover weddings through a fashion lens and in a more candid way. Now the site publishes two or three weddings a week. The team behind it is small: Macon (who also runs the bridal website Over the Moon), lifestyle editor Liam Hess, and a few contributing writers. “We’re pretty scrappy,” says Malle.

Vogue’s desirability has been augmented by a decline in prestigious competition. In recent years, many publications have sunset their wedding editions — including New York — or rethought their approach to bridal coverage. In 2022, the Times announced it was moving away from traditional wedding announcements, crushing the hopes of prominent couples across the nation who had dreamed of seeing their academic and professional bona fides in print. Blum remembers pleading with Bob Woletz, then the editor of the Times’ society-news pages. “He’d say, ‘I’m really sorry,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t think you understand. These people are going to kill me,’” she says. (The Times still covers some weddings, but it focuses more on the couple’s love story than their accolades.)

Other publications, such as Elle, Town & Country, and People, also do wedding coverage, but for many it’s Vogue or bust. “Town & Country is kind of a No. 2 for me,” says one publicist, who adds their client “reluctantly agreed” to be published in the magazine after Vogue turned them down. “You could see they spent a fortune on it, but there was a lack of coolness. It looked a little bit nouveau riche.” Carrie Goldberg, who used to oversee wedding content at Harper’s Bazaar and is now a go-to stylist for many Vogue brides, says it tends to be obvious when a bride plans their wedding in pursuit of a magazine feature. “Every bride says they don’t want to be basic. I would argue that part and parcel of not being basic is not being thirsty, either,” she says. “The wedding-planning process can bring up that little girl in the cafeteria who really wants to be seen, and this is the ultimate version of that.”

“A friend of a friend of a friend called me about getting married at Mar-a-Lago, and they wanted to know if I could help them,” says Blum. “First of all, I wouldn’t. But secondly, they’re like, ‘Well, I know we’re not going to get published because of the venue.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not the venue.’ I was like, That is why you’re getting married there — because you don’t understand what the problem is.”

What makes a wedding Vogue-worthy? “There is no specific criteria,” says Hess. “It’s got to have some sort of X factor, and that could be any number of things. It could be that the bride or groom has an interesting job. On the fashion front, a bride could be wearing six couture looks, but we’re more excited by a bride wearing up-and-coming designers that are buzzy at New York Fashion Week, as opposed to traditional bridal designers.” He adds, “It’s quite instinctive.”

There are ways to sweeten your odds. “Obviously, there are Vogue favorites,” says Blum. “For the most part, no one is hiring an unknown photographer or an unknown planner. They want to see a track record.” The price of admission to this level of vendor is high: The average cost of a wedding planned by Michelle Rago, who worked on Nicola Peltz and Brooklyn Beckham’s wedding, is between $1.5 million and $6 million. “The majority of the weddings that we publish tend to come through the same 50 to 100 planners,” says Hess. Top-tier photographers start at around $80,000.

Sometimes the fashion is your way in. Weddings have become multiday affairs with various outfit changes. Under Malle, Vogue introduced a new column, “Something Bold, Something New,” for when the magazine just wants to highlight unusual wedding fashion rather than the entire event. “Weddings have become extensions of people’s personal brands,” says bridal designer and fashion-girl favorite Danielle Frankel, who has designed custom looks for many Vogue brides, including podcast mogul Alex Cooper and actor Alexandra Daddario.

Venue also comes into play. “None of my brides want to get married in Lake Como anymore because it’s diminished, the cachet of it,” says event planner Jennifer Zabinski, who did Serena Williams’s wedding. “I’ve been told, ‘I can’t look in Italy. Italy’s off the map for my friend group; I can’t pick somewhere in Italy.’” Blum says, “It may appear to people to be arbitrary, but we know, look, if Vogue has done six weddings at castles in Scotland, Ireland, Cotswolds, whatever — they’re just not going to do a seventh.”

Vogue asks couples to submit a dropbox of 75 to 120 images arranged chronologically. “Something can sound like the most exciting wedding in the world on paper; it can have the fashion, the planner, the location,” says Hess. “But if the pictures aren’t up to scratch, then it’s not publishable, essentially.” That’s why Vogue generally doesn’t confirm coverage until it sees the images. “So you have to tell the brides on their honeymoon, ‘Sorry, they said no,’” says Phillips. One woman in the fashion industry had a breakdown after Vogue turned her down. “She burned bridges with a lot of the friends who participated in her wedding as unpaid vendors, blamed the fiasco on all of her guests, and then she checked herself into a ‘trauma retreat’ for over a month,” says one of the attendees.

Vogue requires full exclusivity for all weddings, not just celebrity ones, and because of the demand, your slot on the queue may be months away. By which time, Blum notes, “you’re already pregnant, or you’ve moved on. Who knows if you’re still married?” (There is something of a Vogue “Weddings” curse, with Air Mail documenting at least 27 couples who were featured in the magazine that have since split up. And that’s only the well-known ones.)

Some couples will try to negotiate discounts with vendors if they anticipate that their wedding will get in Vogue with varying rates of success. “The problem is the photographers who are being published in Vogue are always published in Vogue. And that photographer is not selling their intellectual capital because you’re Suzie Floozy from Moozy. That’s not happening,” says Rago. Macon says if she “can sense that some backdoor deal is being done, I’m very clear that that doesn’t fly. We’re not going to serve as the vehicle for you to go out and get all of this stuff comped.”

Ahead of their August 2024 wedding, actor Bobbi Salvör Menuez and artist Quori Theodor created a pitch deck for the event, advertising “notable guests” on one slide (Miranda July, Hunter Schafer, Björk) and “notable contributors” on another (vendors who would be in charge of music, fashion, and photos). Then came the “partnership opportunities” slide: “The creative vision is immense for this celebration and we are looking for partners to elevate what is sure to be an iconic gathering,” citing venue, production, food and beverage, and floral among the categories of interest. And under “press contacts,” they included Vogue. To the couple’s delight, a few days after their wedding, the magazine published a story about it.

“A wedding is a lot of work. It’s a full production and you’re spending months on it and you’re designing it — it’s a creative achievement in a way,” says one fashion editor. “If someone puts on a play or does an art installation, they get press and attention for it. And it’s like, Well, I did all this stuff for my wedding. Where is my round of applause? But actually the reward is you’re marrying the love of your life; you’re with your friends and family having a gorgeous night. Isn’t that enough? But everyone wants to get their money’s worth.”

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