What Goes Around Comes Around
Planning a wedding in the age of the internet is a feat, and I want to start off by congratulating all of you who are out here doing exactly that. No doubt your Instagram feeds are full of trends that are all the rage one minute and labeled cringe the next. The online trend cycle moves at breakneck pace and wedding planning… doesn’t. So what is the best way to handle trends and your wedding? We can’t claim to have all the answers, but as people who see a lot of weddings, here are our two cents:
Photo credits: sourced from Pinterest, Corey Gross Photography
Yes, the internet makes things move faster than they have before, but the trend cycle is called a cycle for a reason. It all comes back. Every trend that feels so immediate of this moment is pulling from something that has been popular before. Princess Diana’s iconic ballgown fueled sky high sleeves and all-over volume throughout the eighties and nineties. There’s a good chance your mom modeled her wedding dress on that trend. By the time you were a kid looking at the photos of your mom in her Princess Diana dress, you knew it wasn’t a recent photo. Wedding sleeves deflated and disappeared, dresses became more form-fitting and embellished. Go a few more years down the line, and now Azazie is full of puff sleeves and bubble hems galore. Waistlines, flower trends, hairstyles, colors, they all follow the same patterns.
Photo credits: sourced from Pinterest, Jenni O Photography
There are two messages that the internet loves to send about trends. 1. What is trendy is in, and you should follow that style to stay relevant, and 2. If you are too trendy, you won’t stay relevant for long because you’ll be stuck to something that will fall out of style. Basically, it’s telling you that, by whatever arbitrary rules your algorithm is following, you can’t win.
Let’s tackle that second idea first. If you are really worried that your wedding will look like a trend and you make all your decisions to avoid any trace of timestamped design, you aren’t really making the choices for you. And even our ideas of timelessness are rooted in our own experience. No matter what your wedding looks like, it will happen at a moment in time, and time will keep moving past it. Ideas of what looks trendy or timeless will change. Your kids will still ask you what year you got married. We still want to celebrate milestones in your life as that anniversary number ticks up. And that’s perfect, because the wedding celebration does not have to represent the entirety of the lives you will build together, it’s only the beginning point.
Photo credits: sourced from Pinterest, Brittany Moser Photography
But also, if the only reason you choose a design is because it is on trend, you might look back and find your wedding doesn’t feel like you. If you like the trend because it resonates with you, great! That is one of the best parts of changing trend cycles, is that they bring different styles into the spotlight that will potentially fit different people really well. If you are doing something specifically to be trendy, just be aware that trying to be at the peak of cool now won’t keep you at the peak of cool forever.
Photo credits: sourced from Pinterest, RCC Photography
Our honest take is that any of your options are good! Trendy designs, classic looks, unique takes, we love it all! Whatever design you decide to use, have fun with it! Take this as an opportunity to use weddings from decades past for design inspiration. At the end of the day, trends happen. You can lean in or try and avoid them, but either way, don’t let the idea that something is popular govern your decisions about your wedding day. It’s fine if people can tell what year you got married. It doesn’t add to or diminish the meaningfulness of your day. The point of the whole shebang is to celebrate you and your spouse with the people you love, so make the day feel like a reflection of that. And yes, we can guarantee you will look back and think you look younger and different and you might have made some different choices, but if you have the right people for the right reasons, those will be fun memories to talk about, not regrets.
xoxo, Rebecca
