Media Climate Pushes Brides to Say 'I Do' to Lavish Wedding Spending

In this season of "I dos," it's the rare bride who goes down the aisle without having absorbed information from ad-packed bridal magazines, Web sites and TV programs advising her on every facet of her wedding day and honeymoon.

Where once a bride could design a memorable day using an etiquette guide and a good caterer, the specialized wedding media of today feed a $161 billion per year industry enriched at the expense of many of the people it purports to serve.

While recommending that their readers work from a budget, at the same time wedding media flood them with glossy images of apparel (one tip: spring for a dress with a glamorous back because guests will be looking at it throughout the ceremony) and exotic locations for "destination" weddings, which are costly for guests as well as the couple, but are up five-fold in 10 years.

The average cost of a wedding has nearly doubled since 1990 to $28,000, according to the American Wedding Study 2006 conducted by the Conde Nast Bridal Group, publisher of Brides, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride magazines.

What the glossy magazines don't point out is the pointlessness of such expenditures. As they soar into wedded bliss, some couples simultaneously sink themselves into debt. Only 30 percent of brides' parents still foot the bill. More than a third of marrying couples admit spending more than they had planned, according to the American Wedding Study.

And since finances have long been the No. 1 point of conflict for couples, confronting a stack of bills on their return from the Disney World destination wedding is not a good way to begin a loving partnership.

The money spent on nuptial extravaganzas could be better used as a big chunk of the down payment on a starter home, with some funds reserved to support local arts, culture and community needs.

Peeking Behind the Tulle Curtain

In a book that has been compared to Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death," a 1963 classic on the excesses of U.S. funeral rites, New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead deconstructs the wedding business in One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, published by Penguin in May.

She discusses aspects of what Conde Nast calls "the wedding lifecycle" that its bridal magazines are apt to ignore. One stage of the process, for instance, could be Chinese sweatshops where gowns sold in the United States are made by workers who sleep eight to a room and earn 30 cents an hour. Another stage is the overspending by brides and their relatives as they get caught up in status-conscious anxiety.

Mead's book has attracted deserved attention from outlets such asUSA Today, the Columbus Dispatch, the Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune and ABC's Good Morning America. But it's a lonely outpost in a crush of commercial messages in traditional and new bridal media, including cable TV.

"Get Married" debuted in April on the WE cable network and then on Lifetime and, of course, has a companion Web site. The show has a "look and book" segment, essentially an infomercial, featuring honeymoon and wedding resorts with an 800 telephone number so viewers can book on the spot.

There's a "celebrity wedding" segment on both the show and the Web site where lots of brides-to-be can experience vicarious thrills. When I visited the site, the "get married" poll asked, "Which celebrity couples nuptials was the most surprising?" Among the pairings were Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, Heidi Klum and Seal. If you register at the site, you can also view "touching details" from celebrity romances. Blecch.

What the site and many like it, such as The Knot, do is collect information from site visitors for merchandising purposes and to encourage them to buy from their online stores.

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