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How weddings got (even more) expensive

Getting married in a social media age.

I have been a bridesmaid six times. I’ve traveled across the country and outside of it to see my friends get married. I’ve planned bachelorette parties in New Orleans and gone to bridal showers in Arizona. I love love. It’s a beautiful thing to witness. But it adds up: the dresses, the flights, the gift.

According to Karen Dunak, a history professor at Muskingum University and author of As Long as We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America, weddings used to be a whole lot simpler. “It was very much a community kind of thing, even sometimes just your immediate family,” she told Vox. “People would have traditional celebrations relying on the local landscape or flowers available in the yard or the community.”

White wedding gowns became popular in the 1920s, but the wedding as we currently know it began to emerge after World War II. As Dunak explains, there was “a leaning into consumer expenditure, consumer display, and being part of an America that’s very much about prosperity and plenty, and the wedding is a location where Americans are able to display that.”

Today, there are few places where that display is more visible than Vogue’s online wedding photo essays. “They’re a big feature with an edit of maybe about 40 to 80 photos from the wedding,” Shelby Wax, a contributing weddings editor at........

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