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........

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