Memorial Day is behind us. It-girl clothing brands recently acquired by private equity firms are making a killing on ’90s-inspired viscose satin slip dresses with a complex relationship to undergarments. A certain kind of conscientious woman, between the ages of 25 and 38, with a remunerative project manager job and a reasonable skincare regimen, is teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Wedding season is upon us.I always enjoy wedding season, for all the usual reasons, but also because I can live in hope that, at least once before the summer fizzles out, I will be invited to a big wedding.I do not mean “big” in the sense of “large numbers of guests.” A big wedding, in the sense that I mean it, includes a large number of guests, but is not reducible to them. It means big in the sense of lavish, grand — a big show, a big to-do. A big wedding means black tie and gowns; it means storied venues with bronze statues behind brownstone facades, terraces overlooking wide expanses of green or blue; it means scads of passed appetizers and perhaps, if you are very lucky, a seafood tower.
A big wedding means, fundamentally, oysters and martinis that someone else is paying for. What’s not to like? Plenty, it seems. Among the cultured and thoughtful, if there is any competition over the size and expense of weddings, it goes in the opposite direction, in an attempt to distance themselves from the Jeff Bezoses of the world. Someone will point out how insane the wedding-industrial complex has become: after all, they got married in a parish hall. Someone else chimes in that they didn’t rent a venue at all: a backyard wedding was just as nice, for half the money! Oh yes, says the next person in line. In fact, I couldn’t be bothered with the fuss of a wedding at all and merely decamped to a justice of the peace. Fools! All fools! It goes on and on: I was captured by Somali pirates on a routine tour of duty and married off to my captor, barefoot and bleeding, in a scant ceremony of dubious legality conducted in the engine room, and now I rule the seas as his pirate queen! And so forth.(Getty Images)
