As we’ve seen our previous posts here and here, weddings have become stupidly expensive in recent years. The biggest reason for this massive increase in price is due to advertising. The wedding industry has spent billions of dollars to make it seem like it’s normal or even romantic to go into debt just to get married. Despite this, the research shows that the more money a couple spent on their wedding, the more likely they were to get divorced.
I wanted to look at a few not so traditional wedding traditions that the industry has pushed on young couples but that don’t actually have traditional roots. Here are a few fake wedding traditions.
White Wedding Dresses
Advertising has greatly impacted the amount of work and money that goes into planning a wedding. For example many people believe that you wear a white wedding dress as a symbol of innocence and purity. The fact of the matter is, until the 1800’s no one wore a white wedding dress. Brides usually just wore a nice dress that they had or made a new one specifically for their wedding. No one wore white because it was impossible to wash white clothes.
It’s still actually impossible to keep clothes white. Modern laundry detergent like Tide contains fluorescent brightening agents that absorb ultraviolet light and re-emit it in the visible spectrum, usually as blue light. This emitted blue light makes white fabric look brighter. If you wash white fabric with old style detergents they will eventually become yellow. That’s why things yellow with age. As a side note: paper is also fluorescent that’s why it looks so white as opposed to the yellowish color of older style parchment.
White wedding dresses didn’t become fashionable until 1840 when Queen Victoria chose to wear a white court dress at her wedding to Prince Albert. Afterwards the European elite started to follow the trend. Because it was impossible to wash white clothes, wearing a white dress to your wedding was a sign of wealth. It said “I can afford to buy a dress that I’ll only wear once”.
White wedding dresses had become a common practice for aristocracy by the end of the 19th century, but common folk only adopted it after World War II. With increased prosperity the wedding industry grew substantially. The practice was firmly cemented in 1981 when Princess Diana wore a white dress to one of the largest televised weddings in history. Long story short, thanks England for this expensive “tradition”.
Alternatives
Look, I know it might be hard to go against the modern white dress tradition. It’s what a lot of young women have grown up dreaming about. But there are a lot of other options you could go with if your budget needs you to or if you just want to spend less. You could sew yourself your own dress, if you’re sew inclined (That’s a bad joke but I’m leaving it in). You could find a really lovely dress in a different color that you loved and wear that. No one is stopping you, it’s your day! You might even get to wear it again this way. If you still really wanted a white dress, you could do what my sister-in-law did: buy a prom dress. They’re much cheaper and still quite lovely.
Wedding Necessities
Bride’s magazine started in 1934 by Wells Drorbaugh (a former advertising manager for House and Garden) as a way for advertisers to reach newly engaged women. In their paper, Francis and Mialon write, “In 1959, Bride’s recommended that couples set aside 2 months to prepare for their wedding and published a checklist with 22 tasks for them to complete. By the 1990s, the magazine recommended 12 months of wedding preparation and published a checklist with 44 tasks to complete.”
The magazine quickly grew in popularity and with all these newly-found targets advertisers quickly created new “traditions” that were necessary for your special day. Like the white dress, the bridal bouquet was first popularized by Queen Victoria and then normalized by the wedding industry.
Giving gifts to the bride and groom is a tradition about as old at marriage itself, but the modern wedding registry was invented in the 20th century. That’s right, weddings are not just more expensive for the bride and groom, but also for attendees! Marshall Fields in Chicago instituted the first wedding registry in 1924 as a way for couples to indicate what type of non-utilitarian gifts they desired. In the late 1930’s Bride’s magazine started hosting annual bridal clinics for department stores that helped them set up wedding registry services. By the end of the 1940’s there were over 500 bride’s shops with full-time consultants. Nowadays you can walk into Bed Bath and Beyond where not only can you make a registry but an employee will talk you through what you “need” and walk around with you–trying to up-sell you!
Alternatives
One of the most important things for you to remember (and one of the hardest things to hang on to) is the fact that your wedding doesn’t need to look like anybody else’s. If you’re happy, that’s the most important thing. Checklists can be valuable tools, but they’re only tools. You don’t need to do everything that’s on them. If you don’t want a bouquet, great! If you do, you can pick some flowers yourself or buy a bouquet from Hy-Vee. You could get real flowers for the bride and fake flowers for everyone else, if that’s cheaper. And when making a registry, register for what you want and what you need. Don’t let a salesperson talk you into something more expensive just because they assure you you’ll want or need it.
Diamond Engagement Rings
Take a look at this quote from the paper we’ve been looking at:
Another example of industry efforts to commodify love and romance is that of marketing campaigns for diamond engagement rings. Several of the most well-known campaigns were by De Beers, the global diamond company. In the late 1930s, De Beers created the slogan “a diamond is forever,” which was rated the number one slogan of the century by Advertising Age (1999). The campaign aimed to link the purchase of a diamond engagement ring to the hope of a long-lasting marriage.
In the 1980s, De Beers introduced another influential campaign, which sought to increase the standard for how much should be spent on an engagement ring with slogans such as “Isn’t two months’ salary a small price to pay for something that lasts forever?” (Cawley, 2014; Sullivan, 2013). These marketing efforts were effective. Prior to World War II, in Western countries, only 10% of engagement rings contained a diamond. By the end of the century, about 80% did (Cawley, 2014). In 2012, total expenditures on diamond rings were roughly $7 billion in the United States (Sullivan, 2013).
Andrew M. Francis and Hugo M. Mialon
The idea of spending 2 months’ salary on an engagement ring is mind boggling. According to the Bureau of labor Statistics the median male full-time worker made $1,103/week. Two months’ salary comes out to $9,559. That’s almost $10k for a rock! Add that to the average cost of a wedding and you’re at over $43,000! Even if you are working a minimum wage job, 2 months’ salary at $7.25/hour comes out to $2,513. More than $2,500 on an engagement ring is ludicrous even if you’re not below the federal poverty level.
How did they Start?
Did you know that diamonds are inherently worthless? Diamonds are just pressurized crystalline carbon. They’re actually quite common and aside from saws and drill bits, they aren’t used for anything other than jewelry. There’s no real value in a diamond. The reason we think of diamonds as engagement ring material is because in 1938 the De Beers Diamond Company found themselves with too much inventory and no one willing to buy them. Go figure, in the Great Depression people weren’t interested in spending hard earned money on worthless shiny rocks.
To fix this problem De Beers hired one of the best advertising agencies in the business. N. W. Ayer & Son, famous for the advertising slogan “When it rains it pours” for Morton Salt. And “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”, advertising Camel cigarettes. That’s right the company responsible for making smoking look cool also came up with “A diamond is forever” and much of the propaganda suggesting that diamonds are a symbol of love.
It’s great advertising. De Beers made a killing in the 20th century with engagement rings, but just because you hear it on TV doesn’t make it true. In fact…
- Diamonds are intrinsically worthless: Former De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer once succinctly explained, “diamonds are intrinsically worthless.”
- Diamonds aren’t forever: They actually decay, faster than most rocks.
- Many Diamonds are socially irresponsible: Many diamonds are still mined under poor conditions often employing child labor. Nearly 25% are blood diamonds.
Alternatives
The problem is that advertising works. Even if you know it’s fake, advertising works. We now have the ability to 3D print diamonds. We can also grow them in a lab. These man-made diamonds are perfect without blemish, and they’re cheaper than buying them De Beers. They also don’t contribute to slavery and murder like a lot of mined diamonds do. Or you can skip the diamond altogether. Moissanite looks a lot like a diamond (only real difference is that is a little more brilliant) and it costs about ¼ the price of diamond.
Or you can go for a different rock entirely. Rubies, sapphires, (which are actually just rubies with a different impurity), emeralds etc. all make beautiful engagement rings. So why are diamonds still the go-to rock for engagement rings? Simple. It’s just the thing you do. And it’s OK to want to do it. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a diamond ring. Even if you know it’s only because of advertising! Just know that there are options and you don’t have to do what De Beers tells you. You don’t have to spend 2-3 months’ salary on a ring. You don’t have to buy a “natural” diamond. Heck, you don’t have to get a diamond at all.
Conclusion
The wedding industry has taken great pains to create these traditions. They have a financial incentive to get you to buy into them. There’s nothing wrong with buying a diamond engagement ring, or wanting a white wedding dress, or setting up a wedding registry. But becoming a sucker for advertising is how you stay poor. Advertisers target your emotions because they know that if they appealed to your logic and good sense they wouldn’t make the sale. Don’t fall for the emotional ploys.
Again, all this isn’t to say don’t do these fake traditions. We had a white wedding dress and a diamond ring. They were both relatively cheap (See our 5 Tips for a Cheaper Wedding post for more info). We also set up a wedding registry and found ideas on Pinterest. But we did it because we wanted to and we did it on the cheap because we didn’t get suckered into the wedding industry’s game.
What do you think? Were any of these “traditions” a shock to you? Let us know in the comments below!