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On the way back from the dragon boat races yesterday, from one the bridges we crossed, we could see four couples getting their wedding photos taken on the shore or sitting with legs dangling playfully in the water. Both brides and grooms wore white. Because of the mud, each bride had an assistant to hold up her dress, while others ran around with reflectors. Setting a young couple in white clothes in a natural space creates a fantasy version of nature that helps heighten the fantasy of the perfect wedding day so that a photograph may communicate it.

It also reminded me of this review of Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. What the review and (if the title is any indication) book don’t cover is that this isn’t only a US-phenomenon but a global one.  The Western wedding of mass-consumption is being exported on a major scale.  China isn’t just a place where the poor may be underpaid to sew fancy wedding gowns (as the article mentions) but also a place where the wealthy, and even the emergent middle class, plan extravagant weddings under the many pageant tents I pass whenever I go into Zhengzhou (and Zhengzhou is not prosperous compared to many other Chinese cities).

In Japan, wedding ads are unavoidable and many couples choose to replace or supplement traditional ceremonies with ones in “wedding chapels”, church-like buildings that only serve one purpose and even provide foreigners to play the role of priest.  (I knew someone who took one of these jobs, and was about as far from a priest as you can imagine.)

Now, I don’t think that the idea of showing off wealth as part of a wedding is something the West invented.  It’s the only that the particular methods of doing so have been growing in global popularity.  Some of this may be due to exoticism.  Some of it may be because of the power of the American entertainment industry. I can also see  how parts of this sort of wedding ceremony fit well with traditional Japanese and Chinese culture (the father giving the bride away to the husband, for instance), but I wonder how much of the symbolism is in fact understood.

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