The false promise of the “timeless” wedding

Imagine it’s the summer of 2012 and you’re attending a wedding. The bouquets and centerpieces are made entirely of greenery (chic!) and the placemats are made of burlap (clever!). The bride wears a flower crown, the groomsmen wear suspenders. Your Moscow mules are served in copper mugs; you get a custom mason jar as a parting gift. The vibe is Martha Stewart meets Mumford & Sons. Distilled into a single term, it is, undoubtedly, “rustic chic.”

You likely won’t see much rustic chic at the weddings you attend this summer. The aesthetic, while beautiful in a sort of folksy way, is a distinct vestige of a particular time and place, which is to say, Obama-era America. Much like Hamilton and Parks and Recreation, the rustic chic wedding recalls a time when mass culture prized earnestness above all, when the hipster sensibility was the ultimate signifier of authenticity and charm. There’s nothing wrong with rustic chic, it’s just that culture has moved past it.

On TikTok, fear of rustic chic is palpable. Women are revisiting their old wedding Pinterest boards, horrified at the boho clichés, dated color schemes, and, God forbid, chevron print that their younger selves didn’t realize “screamed 2014.” And as I begin planning for my wedding next spring, I can’t get rustic chic out of my head. Specifically, I’m obsessed with identifying its 2024 counterpart: What elements of mid-2020s weddings will we look back on and think, “It’s giving Biden administration”?

Like many delusional brides-to-be, I aspire to create a wedding that is, to use perhaps the most overused adjective in the wedding industry right now, “timeless.” Weddings have always been conspicuous displays of wealth and taste, but now that more of us are sharing the evidence online, there’s far more incentive to hold an event that stands the test of time — or at least the ability to post one’s wedding photos for years without feeling kind of embarrassed. That’s more of a difficult needle to thread than ever: Social media, which has the tendency to speed up beauty and fashion trends, rewards newness above all else. A wedding that looks trendy right now, then, will end up looking dated all that much faster.

So what is the 2020s version of “rustic chic”? For the first two years of the decade, the pandemic brought the wedding industry to a screeching halt; elopements and micro-weddings were, for obvious reasons, very big, with millions of nuptials canceled or postponed. By 2022, weddings were indeed “so back”: 2.5 million took place that year, the most since 1984. Industry experts note that post-quarantine weddings have tended to be smaller, with an average of 127 attendees and a rise in sub-50-person weddings.

“Most of our couples are asking for non-wedding weddings,” one event planner told Vogue. You can spot the difference in the details: Bridesmaid dresses don’t match anymore, with brides preferring a range of colors, patterns, and styles versus a single design. Food is served family style rather than a formal sit-down. Photographers shoot docu-style more often than posed portraits.

Kristen Gregor, a New Jersey-based wedding photographer who discusses wedding trends on her TikTok, says, “A lot of people really like having wedding photos that feel very in-the-moment and reflective of the actual fun they’re having. It’s about letting moments unfold and letting the messiness in.”

“Nobody wants to do that faux-happy [thing],” she adds, referring to standard wedding photo tropes where it’s clear the photographer has asked everyone to “look at each other and laugh!” (I can personally attest.)

Brittney Bartling of BLB Events says more clients are asking for film photography or Super 8mm video at their weddings, reflecting a more vintage, intimate approach. “We recently had a 150-person wedding, but because of the design and the lighting, it felt like more of a dinner party vibe,” she says.

At the same time, Gregor has watched as the 2010s rustic chic wedding has gradually grown sleeker and more sophisticated. “I didn’t shoot a wedding without a lace dress for like five years — everyone was doing the bohemian thing, and now it’s a lot more clean lines, slicked-back hair, sleek and minimalist, almost 90s-inspired,” she says. Linen suits, often in gray or navy, boomed in the 2010s, but these days there’s been a noticeable return of tuxedos and black tie attire. Brides magazine dubbed the aesthetic the “cool girl” wedding, often set in urban environments at dimly lit hotels or restaurants, with unposed photos and fashion inspiration taken from ‘90s icons like Calvin Klein and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.

Even at a supposedly chill, non-wedding wedding, the “fun” can still be mostly performative or come across as try-hard. In an attempt to buck traditional stereotypes, some couples will have photos of themselves eating pizza in elevators, taking a sudsy bath on their wedding morning, or jumping on the bed with their bridal parties. “We’ll look back on that and be like, ‘We pushed it past the point of being genuine.’ It relies on the photographer to guide you through staging moments of joy rather than just giving you the space to have a good time,” Gregor says.

Scroll through any clothing brand’s bridal section and you’ll find even more evidence of the “cool girl” and adjacent “old money” bridal aesthetic: Bows, just as in the rest of the fashion world, are on everything now, as are pearls. Champagne towers are about as standard as a cake-cutting, bringing in 1920s decadence to a vibe meant to pay homage to the American socialites of yore. Country western weddings are also having a moment, likely as part of a rising interest in country western music and culture in general.

But there’s one wedding aesthetic that I can’t seem to escape. Everywhere I look, women are sharing photos and videos of their impossibly lovely summer garden party weddings, with bridesmaids lined up in a rainbow of pastels and guests clutching handmade place cards. This June, searches for “garden party wedding” spiked on Google after a steady rise beginning in 2021.

It’s possible that “garden party” weddings are surging due to the pandemic rise in cottagecore, the internet aesthetic devoted to pastoral images of baby ducklings, handmade baskets, and Beatrix Potter. (Related themes drawn from fairytales like “dark fantasy wedding” are also increasingly popular on Pinterest.) According to the 2024 Pinterest Wedding Report, “Trending venues show that they are planning intimate weddings in cozy environments that connect with nature. They are embracing casual wedding dresses, easy hairstyles and simple makeup.” From February 2023 to February 2024, searches for “whimsical garden wedding” went up 450 percent, “garden wedding reception outdoor” went up 290 percent, “fairy garden wedding dress” went up 155 percent, and “colorful garden wedding” went up a whopping 650 percent.

This would all be perfectly fine if “garden party” was not the precise aesthetic my fiancé and I are going for for our own wedding. It turns out that even when you pick an ostensibly timeless theme (a party! in a garden!) you can still pretty much be reduced to a line in a graph of Google searches.

Initially, I was adamant I needed to get married indoors so as to avoid any pre-Big Day panic over whether it might rain. My Pinterest board was filled with moody interiors in candlelit, overstuffed historic homes until we landed on a venue with a wildflower garden pretty enough that if it rains, we can just say “fuck it, we’ll get wet.” A garden party color palette, therefore, makes a lot more sense than me attempting to smuggle a “dark academia” vibe into a springtime outdoor wedding.

This, as it turns out, might be the key to planning a timeless wedding, if that’s your aim. “When people ask me what I think is going to be tried-and-true and timeless, it’s things that make sense for the place,” explains Gregor. The rustic chic weddings that didn’t work in the 2010s, she says, were the ones where “people who were having ballroom weddings were bringing wood slabs and burlap inside.” The problem isn’t rustic chic or garden party, then — it’s the shoehorning of elements that don’t belong together.

Joanna Spicer, a 34-year-old LA-based content creator and ceramist who got married in May at Switzer Farm in Westport, California, was cognizant of not falling into the same trap. “I had so many things saved that were for like, a Tuscan wedding, and it’s like, ‘We’re not getting married in Italy.’ Part of the planning process was letting go of the vision and creating a new reality, because the fantasy is never going to measure up.” She managed to incorporate wedding trends I love — a dinner party feel, a garden aesthetic, docu-style photography — without feeling on-the-nose trendy.

She realized that the small things she fretted over — the “so 2020s” squiggle border around her signage, for example — weren’t important. “You just get so swept up in the love and everyone getting together that anything that goes wrong, it just doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, it was perfect.”

Ultimately, Gregor says, “It’s a fruitless quest to have a wedding that isn’t trendy at all.” Much like with our collective fear of trendy baby names, planning a wedding often feels unwinnable: Throw a wedding that’s very of its time and you’re a bore who fell victim to the trend of the moment. Try something genuinely unique and you risk being too idiosyncratic. Weddings are expensive, stressful, and somehow meant to be an encapsulation of two people who love each other. They’re hard enough to plan without the pressure to create something truly “timeless.”

If, in a few decades, the world looks back on garden party weddings as distinctly mid-2020s culture, that’s probably fine and normal. By that time, who knows? Maybe rustic chic will have come back around again.