Marriage Contracts; A generation ago, traditional extravagant

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Apr 27, 2003 | by Vicky Allan

WE'RE not selling dresses," says Karen Jane Mills, wedding planner, as she rakes through a rack of satin, sparkles and tulle to select an appropriate dress for me. "We're selling dreams." It's a slogan that wouldn't be out of place on any of the world's most successful consumer products. We're not just selling trainers, we're selling a dream. We're not just selling a soft drink, a watch, a car, a mobile phone - we're selling a fantasy.

But the dream that is a wedding has to be one of the most potent, distilled through centuries of self-caricature, choc a bloc with Jungian archetypes and stirring iconography; an irresistible advertisement for itself and one which, however sophisticated we might get, never ceases to pluck at our psyches.

There is a moment Mills describes when even the most serious businesswoman turns to "mush". Standing in front of the mirror, posing, often in some big, sparkly, fairytale number, a dreamy look passes over her eyes. "They can't take their eyes off themselves, even the shy ones. 'It's really nice', they whisper. Their eye is drawn back again and again, they fall in love with the look. Even a seemingly unromantic girl, get them in the right wedding dress, and it happens. All that pressure of getting to be a successful modern woman means they've suppressed all these girly things as they've got older, and, suddenly, it's dressing up time. It presses every button. It's the tutu, the tiara, and looking at pretty things, and you're allowed to do it. It's your wedding."

It may seem surprising that this seduction still works today, but not only are weddings getting bigger and more expensive, there is also a return to an idea of the traditional. Gone are the hippy 1970s when it was sufficient to go barefoot in cheesecloth and exchange grass rings. Big dresses are in again, along with favours, castles, fireworks, magicians, string quartets. In the last 10 years, far outstripping inflation, the cost of a wedding has increased tenfold. The average wedding in the UK now costs (pounds) 14,750 in a (pounds) 10 billion-a-year industry. Until recently it was speculated that it was the downward spiral of the institution of marriage that prompted this extravagance, as if the dwindling participants were trying to exorcise the spectre of divorce and serial monogamy. But last year, for the first time in decades, marriages in Scotland were on the increase again and second marriages can often be as big as first.

The trend is all the more exaggerated in America, where a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine ran an article headlined Weddings Inc, which detailed not only the increasing cost (on average $22,000) but also the marketing devices of a wedding industry where selling a dress is described as "closing the deal", brides fall victim to "white blindness" after seeing too much "product", and gown retailers are on the look out for the "Oh Mommy" moment, when customers fall for a dress. In Scotland, we're not that extreme yet.

"We're always a wee bit slow in catching on - but it's slowly happening," says Paula Khan of the The Scottish Wedding Directory. Wedding planners are on the increase, partly because of the number of weddings held in Scotland for visitors from the US or England. The Scottish Wedding Show at the SECC had 6000 visitors and nearly 200 exhibitors, with services ranging from tanning and tooth whitening to ice sculptors. There are a proliferation of guides about how to do it. One site dedicated to all things nuptial, confetti.co.uk, has 436,000 visitors a month, and supplies anything from candles to 'how to' books for everyone from the bridesmaid to the bride's mother.

But the change in the anatomy of the wedding is not purely industry-driven. It's there in the demographics. Couples are getting married older. The average age for a woman is 32, for a man it's 35. They often have a significant disposable income and 60% of couples are paying for the event themselves. Perhaps both work, or have children and are short on time so may use a wedding planner. For those with a certain amount of money, it makes sense. Wedding planners know the market, their suppliers are reliable, they know the good sources from the charlatans, and often they can save their customer as much as their service fee. They also style themselves as surrogate parents or aunties, without the emotional baggage of real family, happy to be the scapegoat if someone needs to be blamed for the seating plan. "Every single bride," says wedding planner George Brown of Leave It To Us, "is treated as if she was our daughter."

Key to any wedding plan is the dress. It takes centre stage, bound up in a relationship with the bride and the venue, so that almost all other plans spiral out from it. It's also what you see as soon as you walk into the offices of The Wedding Planner in Helensburgh. As Karen Jane Mills says, when she and her partner Lorna Buchanan first set up their business they asked themselves: "What is the first thing people do as soon as they've got the engagement ring on their finger?" Their answer? They go and look at pretty dresses.