Is the Death of Millennial Wedding Culture Upon Us?
6 min readEarlier this month, Taylor Swift—perhaps the ultimate millennial among us—married Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce in a multimillion-dollar ceremony in an 820,000-square-foot sports and entertainment complex. Reportedly, nearly 1,000 guests were in attendance. For some reason, Adam Sandler officiated. Like the excesses of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI before them, Swift and Kelce’s nuptial festivities feel, to me, like the swan song of a decadent era. I believe we’re on the verge of a wedding revolution.
In 1979, my parents celebrated their marriage in my grandparents’ backyard in Lincolnwood, Illinois. My mom wore an ivory chiffon wrap dress she bought off a sale rack at Saks for $50. The cake was a modest two-tier from Bennison’s, a no-frills local bakery where my siblings and I would stop after baseball practices in the years to come. Guests brought the rest of the food, potluck style: cold cuts and crudité. One of my parents’ best friends is in the wine business, so they had nice champagne. My mom estimates that the entire wedding cost around $500. In today’s dollars, that would be a little over $2,000.
“It was a lovely, normal wedding,” she said. “For the time.”
In the decades since, the wedding industry has ballooned to a heart-stopping $100 billion in this country. Millennials like me were fed a steady diet of wedding media like TLC’s popular reality series Say Yes to the Dress and Instagram carousels of celebrities and influencers saying “I do,” so incurring enormous expenses for our weddings seemed, to many of us, not only normal but expected. After enough desensitization, we accepted the industry’s demands: to pay $5,000 for a custom gown we were only going to wear for 10 hours; to fill our venues with greenhouses worth of fresh flowers; to hire a 10-person live band to play our receptions; to ask our friends to forfeit exorbitant sums for bachelorette weekends and bridesmaids’ dresses; to give our guests not only party favors, but personalized welcome bags at their hotel, full of local jam and individual packets of Tylenol and a map featuring every local restaurant where the couple celebrated an anniversary.
Reality television and social media distorted our understanding of these celebrations. Growing up, we weren’t merely exposed to the weddings of our cousins or family friends, or the occasional broadcast of a royal nuptials—we were bombarded from all angles with footage and imagery of the lavish celebrations of the extraordinarily wealthy, famous and not famous alike. I’ve had friends who’ve said they wanted a diamond headpiece like Kim Kardashian and an aisle showered with rose petals like in the opening credits of Newlyweds.
These sorts of weddings were no longer preposterous for us; they were aspirational. Then, elements of them were no longer aspirational; they were the standard.
My own wedding, which was modest by 2018 standards—I will never forget the florist’s facial expression when I told her I didn’t need a bouquet—still cost me and my husband half of my annual salary. Even at that cost, there were people we couldn’t afford to invite, as that would have meant a bigger venue and thousands more dollars. (I still feel guilty about the guests I was forced to cut from the list in the interest of cost savings.) In a 2024 survey, 56 percent of couples reported going into debt to pay for their weddings.
But lately, as I’ve started to talk to younger friends who are getting engaged, I’ve noticed a shift. Nearly all of the millennials in my life are either married or purposefully unmarried, but the wave of Gen Z weddings is beginning to crest. You might think that a generation who grew up online would take what millennials did to these ceremonies and amplify them even further, conscious of the potential of this once-in-a-lifetime moment for top-tier content. But I’ve actually found—at least anecdotally—that the opposite is true.
In many ways, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Gen Z has lived most of their lives amid periods of profound economic precarity, and the idea of spending thousands and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars on a single day seems absurd. “The wedding industrial complex is such a scam,” shared my Gen Z friend Chloe, who is getting married next year in a small, remote ceremony with just her and her fiancé’s parents and siblings present. “Everything—venues, dresses, flowers, and catering—is up-charged and so expensive. Massive weddings feel like a performance of perfection and status.”
As a result, eloping is considered a chic option among many Gen Z couples, and courthouse weddings—which cost $120 on average—are back in vogue. Instead of renting out banquet halls, some couples are opting for small dinners. My Gen Z friend Rachel recently celebrated her wedding at a Mexican restaurant with about 25 friends and family members. “Sixty percent of [our decision] was we didn’t want to go into debt,” she told me, “and the other 40 percent was just being exhausted by all of the traditional aspects of weddings that didn’t serve us. And from an environmental standpoint, I just think the wedding industry is so wasteful. Who wants to buy hundreds of tea candles and then have them sit in a garage for years?”
Even those couples who are hosting more traditional ceremonies seem to be approaching them very differently. Instead of custom gowns dotted with thousands of Swarovski crystals, some Gen Z brides are sourcing vintage dresses, often not only for cost purposes but in the interest of sustainability. Many are opting out of wedding parties. Among some populations, the days of matching sage green dresses and over-the-top bachelorette and bachelor weekends seem to be waning, with younger couples in my life not wanting to ask their friends to pay even more money to celebrate their marriage.
Plenty of Gen Z couples still care deeply about how their weddings will look to viewers on social media. But there are many whose ceremonies are being captured in the same way my parents’ was nearly 50 years ago: with film photography. Banished are the endless hours of posed photos with different arrangements of family members. At a Gen Z wedding a friend of mine attended the other week, they were asked to be the photographer simply because they had a nice camera on hand. And though they might post a few choice photos on Instagram, the Gen Z couples I know are not sharing every moment of these celebrations. For a generation that has been overexposed since puberty, their weddings veer more private. I think it’s notable that no one knew Gen Z icon Zendaya was married until she and Tom Holland showed up on the red carpet wearing wedding rings. And the public still has yet to see a single photo from their ceremony—I don’t know that we ever will.
“I think about Naomi Klein’s notion of ‘digital doppelgängers’ a lot, and how in this day and age we have ourselves and our digital others,” my friend Chloe told me. “Weddings are now engineered for optics and how they’ll appear in content rather than how they feel in real life. I hate that.”
I’ve been thinking about this obsessively for the past several years, as my second novel, Tenderness, is set over the course of a wedding weekend. It takes place in the 1970s, the same decade as my parents’ celebration. While writing it, I thought deeply about what weddings mean to us, both then and now. There has, of course, always been a performative quality to these festivities. In my novel, the bride is using her wedding to perform normalcy—to pretend that she is stable, and that she wants the life her wealthy, doting fiancé is offering her. But in the past few decades, this performance has gotten completely away from us, to the point that Taylor Swift’s wedding seemed almost like another stop on her world-famous Eras Tour.
What would it mean for us to think of these celebrations not as a performance, but as simply what they are at their core: traditions, rituals, ceremonies marking the start of a marriage?
I look at the photographs in my parents’ wedding album, and I believe I can see exactly who they were in that moment. They were not at the center of any circus. They were just a young couple, relaxed and happy, standing on the same grass my father played on when he was a little boy. This is what I think—and what I hope—future generations want. No performance, and fewer expectations. I believe this is something to which all exhausted millennials can raise a flute of champagne, wishing them every happiness.