One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding [Hardcover]

Rebecca Mead (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 10, 2007

The 160-billion dollar behemoth that is the American wedding industry and the psychology behind the expense, stress, and folly associated with the typical American wedding

Using the American wedding as a rosetta stone, in One Perfect Day writer Rebecca Mead poses a series of questions that cut to the heart of our national identity. Why, she asks, has the American wedding become an outlandishly extravagant, egregiously expensive, and overwhelmingly demanding production? What is the derivation of the nuptial imperative upon brides and grooms to observe tradition while at the same time using the wedding as a vehicle for expressing their personal style? What does an American wedding tell us about how Americans consume, relate, and live today? One Perfect Day masterfully mixes investigative journalism and social commentary to explore the workings of the wedding industry-an industry that claims to be worth $160 billion to the U.S. economy and which has every interest in ensuring that the American wedding business becomes ever more lavish and complex. Taking us inside the workings of the wedding industry-from the swelling ranks of professional wedding planners to department stores with their online wedding registries to the retailers and manufacturers of wedding gowns to the Walt Disney Company and its Fairytale Weddings program-Rebecca Mead skillfully holds the mirror up to the bride's deepest hopes and fears about her wedding day and dissects the myriad goods and services that will be required for her role within it.

Weddings are no longer a rite of passage, no longer a transition from childhood to adulthood, or an initiation into a sexual or domestic intimacy, nor necessarily a religious ritual. The result of this cultural shift is that the event itself has taken on an ever-increasing momentousness shaped as much by commerce and marketing as by religious observance or familial expectation. The American wedding gives expression to the values and preoccupations of our culture. For better or worse, the way we marry is who we are.

In researching One Perfect Day, Rebecca Mead goes deep behind the scenes of the $161 billion wedding industry to discover how the American wedding is manufactured. Targeting business conventions, trade shows, factories abroad, and more, Mead studies the data produced by the wedding industry, for the benefit of its advertisers, on the consuming patterns of brides and grooms; reads thousands of words in trade publications and industry websites to reveal how the industry thinks and talks about their clients when they are out of earshot-as "a drunken sailor"; "a slam dunk"; or more pointedly, "a marketer's dream." Mead reports from:

Behind the scenes at the Association of Bridal Consultants' "Business of Brides" conference: Wedding planners learn how to target the upcoming "Echo Boom" bridal market, estimated at 4,200,000 brides by 2018. ("It seems like the less money people have, the more they spend," says the association's director of corporate relations, page 36)

"Top Fashion" wedding-dress factory: Mead visits a factory in Xiamen, China, where migrant workers who live eight to a room in dormitories turn out 100,000 dresses a year. A skilled seamstress earns six dollars a day making dresses that sell for a national average of $1,025. (pages 98, 81)

* Disney World's Wedding Pavilion: Mead explores how Disney built up its now-mammoth wedding program in the 1990s to combat threats to its theme-park preeminence. ("Couples are highly brand-receptive in this stage of their lives...If you handle their wedding and honeymoon correctly you create cherished friends," says the co-founder of Disney Fairy Tale Weddings, page 71). Note: rental of Cinderella's Coach: $2500 per ceremony.

* Behind the bridal registry: Department stores see registries as a means of gaining access to young, impressionable consumers who are forming brand loyalties-what one industry report calls "Your New $100 Billion Customer: the Engaged Woman" (page 117)

* Las Vegas, Nevada: Site of a 122,000 weddings a year, where competition is so great that hand-billers stalk the courthouse steps and Britney Spears's swiftly-annulled nuptials are used as a marketing tool (page 170)

* The honeymoon and destination wedding industry in Aruba: This Caribbean island is so eager to capture its share of the American wedding market that it changed its marriage laws-now one out of every three weddings conducted in Aruba is for tourists. "I call it the 'new elopement," says one industry expert (page 200)

* The phenomenon of "vow renewal": Mead visits Sandals Royal Caribbean Hotel, in Montego Bay, Jamaica-a wedding factory, hosting between 5-10 ceremonies a day, of which 1 in 6 is a vow-renewal ceremony. Brides and grooms get to re-enact the "once in a lifetime" moment of marriage as often as their budget will allow (page 216)

* A class for would-be wedding planners: Attendees are taught to size up clients by making house calls-the fancier the bride's home, the bigger the budget-and to persuade brides to attend their "how to plan your own wedding" seminars ("She's going to come out of the course going, Oh, God, I don't want to do that. Just show her what it involves and she'll be scared to death," page 51)

* "Vows" magazine and other trade publications: Mead reveals how trade magazines urge retailers to squeeze more dollars out of each bride: "Just when a bride thinks she'll have to spend no more, it's your job to remind her that her bridal image looks incomplete"(page 83). The number of brides-about 2.3 million a year-cannot be increased by marketing efforts, and rates of marriage are on the decline, so each bride bears more of the burden of increasing industry profits.

* A seminar for wedding dress retailers in Las Vegas: Chip Eichelberger, a motivational speaker, offers advice on the pacing of a sale-"If you get them excited about the three-hundred-dollar dress it's hard to get them excited about the three-thousand-dollar dress"-and how to act upon "the 'Oh, Mommy,' moment," when a bride falls in love with a gown (page 78-79)

* Hebron Church, also known as "The Chapel on the Hill": A struggling rural Wisconsin church is forced by economic pressures to moonlight as a commercial wedding chapel (page 145), while the ranks of freelance wedding ministers-some with credentials acquired online-who will perform crowd-pleasing "spiritual" ceremonies replete with rituals invented for the camera begin to swell (page 130).

* Gatlinburg, Tennessee: The "honeymoon capital of the South," a Bible-belt mountain destination where there are annually 5 weddings per year-round-resident. The wedding-chapel business was founded in 1979 by the controversial Reverend Ed Taylor, a former Baptist minister. "I think it is dangerous, spiritually dangerous, to use the Lord in that manner-in order to gain business, and to use it as a marketing tool," says a rival chapel owner (page 162)

* Behind the scenes at the Wedding & Event Videographers Association International annual convention: Videographers are advised to double their prices ("I was blind to the fact that people want the best for their children," says one successful videographer), told how to incorporate comic shots (the "gift steal" and the "runaway groom"), and learn how to slice and dice raw footage into multiple video products to increase profits. The value of video is promoted as "preserving memories" that will otherwise be "lost." "You have to get [them] initially, before they spend $3000 on napkins" (page 185)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In its nascence in the American lexicon, the term "Bridezilla" has inspired articles, reality television and watercooler tales of brides gone mad. This phenomenon piqued New Yorker staff writer Mead's interest, sending her on a three-year investigation of the current American wedding and the $161-billion industry that spawned it. "Blaming the bride," she writes, "wasn't an adequate explanation for what seemed to be underlying the concept of the Bridezilla: that weddings themselves were out of control." Interviewing wedding industry professionals and attending weddings in Las Vegas, Disney World, Aruba and a wedding town in Tennessee, Mead ventures beyond the tulle curtain to reveal moneymaking ploys designed around our most profound fears as well as our headiest happily-ever-after fantasies. Goods and services providers alter marital traditions—and even invent new ones—to feed their bottom line. Stores vie for bridal registry business in hopes of gaining lifelong customers. Women swoon for what retailers call "the 'Oh, Mommy' moment" in boutique fitting rooms—an unsettling contrast to the Chinese bridal gown factory workers who make them possible, sleeping eight to a room and scraping by on 30 cents an hour. Part investigative journalism, part social commentary, Mead's wry, insightful work offers an illuminating glimpse at the ugly underbelly of our Bridezilla culture. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Reminiscent of Jessica Mitford's I^ The American Way of Death (1963), although written in a considerably lighter vein, this eye-opening book looks at weddings not merely as unions of two people who are in love with each other but also as products of an industry that is in love with money. Mead begins with a fascinating overview of the Bridezilla phenomenon, a recent coinage that quickly entered the language as a term to describe an excessively self-absorbed, tyrannical, my-way-or-the-highway bride-to-be (the term has inspired books and reality TV shows). In 2006, Mead notes, the wedding industry took in about $161 billion. Magazine publishers, she explains, now add value for their advertisers by holding seminars on how to get married (featuring displays of wedding-related products, from fashion to cookery to linens). Similarly, bridal registries--the first was established in 1924--have become crucial sources of revenue for department stores and specialty shops. Once-peripheral features, such as wedding planning and videography, are fast becoming industries unto themselves. And on and on. Weddings, Mead argues in this revealing mix of popular history and social criticism, are reflections of who we are, and the wedding industry is a reflection of the culture we have created: ruthlessly organized, product-oriented, fiscally irresponsible, but still, somehow, retaining a bit of romance. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; First Edition edition (May 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594200882
• ISBN-13: 978-1594200885
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #978,292 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

111 of 115 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Maybe a little sanity will return to weddings... May 14, 2007

By lnbel

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm not married but I've been to 5-6 weddings a year the past few years and am in 2 this June. I have been totally flabbergasted that so many of my friends -- very thoughtful and unconventional in every other aspect -- swallow the most meaningless consumerist drivel when it comes to their weddings. I'm a professional designer and out of all those weddings, I can't remember a single bridesmaid's hairstyle, a single centerpiece, or what any of the cakes looked or tasted like. I'll never eat a wedding dinner that's as well-prepared as any of the San Francisco restaurants that I frequent, and some of the best wedding food I've had was mostly purchased from the Whole Foods deli -- around $1,000 instead of $10,000. What I remember and enjoy is the ceremony and the symbolism of two people getting married, and the fun of celebrating afterwards with friends and family. The fact that my girlfriends spend months and tens of thousands of dollars agonizing over useless stuff completely astounds me. I don't understand why everyone gets so neurotic about it!

What I liked about Mead's book is that she does not seem to be writing from within the dominant paradigm: she doesn't take it for granted that a meaningful wedding requires matching bridesmaid hairstyles or that it's a daring, hand-wringing proposition to (gasp!) let members of the wedding party choose their own shoes. I suppose that I find so much of what brides worry about to be utter nonsense, and I wish there were more voices (besides from the fabulously stodgy Miss Manners) that did not assume that the only way to properly symbolize a marriage is with $10,000 of floral arrangements.

This book is not comforting. The author's tone is dry and you can tell from the language she uses that much of the industry seems over the top to her. She doesn't seem to have a lot of sympathy for the sentimentalism of weddings -- which I think is a well-needed attitude, since so much of the uselessly expensive garbage of the wedding industry is sold using manufactured sentiment. ("But it's the MOST important DAY of your LIFE and of COURSE you NEED custom-printed M&Ms! Because how else will your friends and loved ones know what this day MEANS to you?")

41 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Nearly perfect and hilarious June 1, 2007

By TargetFan

Format:Hardcover

I think some of the reviewers are missing the point. Mead's book is not an instruction manual in helping brides avoid manipulation. It is a sociological examination of how we choose to celebrate marriage and what this says about American culture. I mean the book wasn't shelved in the wedding section at the book store where I purchased it. It was shelved under socoiology.

"One Perfect Day" offers fascinating insight into how the significance of the ceremony has increased as the differences between pre-married life and married life has decreased for many couples.

While looking at this cultural shift, it explores the role of the industry that has sprung up to maintain it. None of the vendors and industry representatives come off looking like bad people. But they are business people and businesses exist to make profit.

I would, however, have liked to see more about the role that parents play in pushing their daughters into the role of bridezilla. In my experience, both parents are usually the primary drivers behind the more, more, more philosophy of wedding planning -- and often push girls who wanted to have a simple wedding into an elaborate affair. I would have especially liked to read an analysis of parental interactions with the bridal industry.

55 of 59 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wedding Culture in the Age of Bridezilla June 17, 2007

By Jean E. Pouliot

Format:Hardcover

As we stagger into the third millennium, nothing is what it once was. That goes double for weddings. Once, weddings were a celebration of the transition of young people from parental control to their own control under the watchful eye of a beneficent Deity. Now, with the loosening of parental control, with the rise of cohabitation, the decline in church attendance, with the separation of sex and baby-making, and with the rise of a self-oriented consumer culture, the stage has been set for massive change in the way couples view marriage and the ceremony that kicks it off. Actually, the stage is far past set: we are well into Act II.

Author Rebecca Mead could have taken a number of approaches to this new culture. She could have been censorious about its narcissism, or applauded its liberation from its ancient anchors. Instead, she adopts a somewhat bemused, slightly aghast tone that allows her subjects to speak for themselves. And speak they do! Mead's main focus is the wedding industry, which is at an enormously-profitable dream machine. She obtained her information from a close reading of bridal journals, interviews with the industry's visionaries, attending trade shows and visiting sites from Wisconsin to Las Vegas to Aruba to China. What she sees is either refreshingly or depressingly the same all over. Brides (and an increasing number of men) are being sold on the idea that they must stage a dream wedding with all the "traditional" touches that expresses their personal sense of style. And the more money spent the better. Mead makes it clear however, that many of the features considered traditional are not all that old. Only since the 1920s, for instance, have the majority of American brides been married in white silk gowns. Some touches are plain obsessive, like the need to match the attendant's vests to the napkins. Mead calls these faux-ancient touches "traditionalesque"-- shallow imitations of tradition sold by people who have interests at heart other than launching couples into married bliss.

Mead takes us behind the scenes of the wedding industry and unveils the techniques that bridal planners and others use to keep their customers buying, buying, and buying. We meet low-paid Chinese workers laboring for pennies per gown in enormous factory settings. We meet the faux-ordained who tailor their services to their customers' desire for a churchy setting with but a veneer of religiosity. We meet the good people of Disney, that most profit-generating dream machine, who evolved from providing a few shots of the couple with Mickey and Minnie, to providing the entire princess package that includes a rented Cinderella coach ($2500 for a half-hour) with footmen and horses for brides who want to identify with their favorite character. We meet photographers whose repertoire of "iconic" not-so-candid shots varies little from wedding to wedding and videographers who slioce and dice their product into finely-edited packages that the couple must purchase separately and at great cost.

Mead often seems appalled by the crassness, venality and self-indulgence of American weddings, and only seldom finds a group that seems to understand that after a wedding comes marriage, which is more than the opportunity to watch wedding videos. She rhapsodizes over a British couple in Las Vegas, whose entire wedding party (including their parents and children) attended a ceremony in full Elvis regalia. For all the pop silliness of their choice, they seemed to understand the larger ramifications of their life together as a family, and Mead was touched.

Mead's writing is as elegant and dainty as the filigree on a lace doily. Sentence like this often appear, like pearls on a beaded white glove: "After a few hours, I was ovecome by a condition know among retailers as "white blindness," a reeling, dumbfounded state in which it becomes impossible to distinguish between an Empire-waisted gown with alencon lace appliqués and a bias-cut spaghetti strap shift with crystal detail, and in the exhausted grip of which I wanted only to lie down and be quietly smothered by the fluffy weight of it all, like Scott of the Antarctic." You have to admire a writer who can deliver an image like that and link it naughtily to a nearly-obscure historical simile.

Put all of this together and you get a well-written, fascinating and eye-opening look at one of America's most revered yet most abused traditions. After reading this book, one may indeed wonder whether the institution of marriage would be better off without the industry devoted to its initiation.