Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition (review)

Ah, how straight and gay men yearn for the day that they, too, will finally receive their engagement ring. Poring over groom's magazines, furtively trying on those tuxes in the groom's salons despite not even having a partner, much less an engagement—but when a man has that gold ring put on his finger, he knows he participates in the age-old traditional celebration of ….

Oh, excuse me—wrong scenario. Wedding marketers, especially jewelers, failed in the 1930s to create the new "tradition" of the man's engagement ring. It was an isolated misstep; the bridal and wedding industry has been effective for decades in manufacturing traditions which, when accepted, become yet another layer of consumerism tied directly to the act of getting married.

Vicki Howard's Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition is a much-needed study of the commercial wedding industry. On the basis of the selling of "traditions," the marriage market has repeatedly introduced innovations that within a generation became traditional components of a "real" wedding, such as department store gift registries in the 1920s and bridal sets of coordinated engagement and wedding rings in the 1930s. As Howard illustrates with the example of the failed man's engagement ring, these strategies have been successful so far, as customers have been willing to adopt the new traditions. The engagement ring for men (marketed as "The Guardian," for example) challenged too many gender expectations. "The Modern Expression of an Ancient Custom," as one ring's ad copy ran, and an effort to position the ring as a material marker of a change in marital status, did not succeed in convincing women and men that men needed an engagement ring. The rings lacked the sturdy superstructure integral to the marketing efforts toward women: a sales campaign not only needed the gender roles dictating submissive acceptance of being given the ring, but also magazines, commercial outlets such as salons, and above all, already standing traditions that reinforced the newly manufactured necessity of the purchase. Customers resisted, and the men's engagement ring faded away. Men's wedding rings, however, were adopted by consumers in the 1940s and 1950s, and the double-ring wedding ceremony developed to accommodate the new practice.

The Big Wedding was, once upon a time, a not-so-big wedding governed by ethnic and religious traditions. The big wedding developed, as larger national trends shifted toward more intensified consumerist practices. By the 1920s, the wedding industry was in place. Marriage was promoted as a consumer ritual, replete with goods and services all promising the bride a perfect show of good taste. Howard's examination of the service industry of weddings is particularly strong: the development of the bridal salon in the 1950s, and its attendant queen, the Consultant, is an example of the shift toward a secular authority, the female professional planner. Women professionals in the wedding industry navigated between their roles as arbiters of "tradition" and as the sellers of innovation. Their own careers pointed to the disconnection between the two impulses: career women, their professional roles depended on the force of traditional definitions of femininity.

The bridal consultant was the glamorous personification of the industry. This touch of glamour is one aspect of commercial weddings lacking from Howard's account. The consumerist fantasia that is the big wedding is central to understanding the active role of female consumers. The rise of the white wedding dress (not fully adopted until the 1930s and 1940s) parallels the increasingly fantastic proportions of both the wedding and the expectations of young women for the ritual. She does not expand upon the ways in which the wedding dress, with its anachronistic adherence to boning, elaborate underpinnings of seamed netting, princess seaming, and the like, reflects not only the older dressmaking methods, which have largely disappeared from the ready-to-wear market, but also the much-treasured ideals of womanhood likewise reflective of...