A reporter recently contacted me to ask about the "new wedding trend" of couples getting married at home. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan were married at home, so would others now do so as well?
Over 2,000,000 couples get married in the U.S. every year. Thousands of these people will get married at home. But there have always been thousands of people getting married at home. Some of the current home weddings are large, complicated affairs. I have one friend who had a floor built over his mother's swimming pool so that he could have room to get married in her backyard. Others are simple. My own booking company gets requests all the time for a soloist to play in a living room for a simple wedding with a small number of guests.
After Pippa Middleton wore a white Maid of Honor dress the wedding world declared that white was the new color; all bridesmaids would be wearing white for the next year or two. It's true that many 2012 and 2013 brides have chosen white for their wedding party, some of them influenced by the royal wedding, but there are still countless other brides choosing pink, green, or "Tangerine Tango" for their bridesmaids. With so many weddings every year, almost anything can be considered a wedding "trend."
Also, anything can be considered "not a trend." I recently wrote about people who hire Elvis impersonators for their weddings and request Elvis songs for their reception. One commenter said that she had been to two weddings this year and had not heard a single Elvis song. A bandleader said that his clients in New York never want Elvis. It's a hard thing for me to say, but I was wrong and they were right--sort of. Among their friends and clients, Elvis is not a trend. But, in other communities, Elvis certainly is. I know because every year hundreds of people book Elvis impersonators for their weddings.
So, if nothing and everything is a wedding trend, why do wedding blogs and magazines keep telling you what the newest trends are? Well, for one thing, they want to stay current and keep you looking at their sites. They're running a business and your eyeballs pay the bills. But less selfishly, I like to think they want to help you come up with ideas of your own. Not ideas that fit the "trendy" idea of what a wedding should be, but ideas that work for you and your wedding.
Somewhere there's a bride who would love to come up with a unique wedding favor. She reads an article about silhouette and caricature artists as a new "trend" and now she has her idea. This is the great thing about wedding trend articles, and the Internet wedding world in general--there's something for everyone. Does a trend appeal to you? Great, do it. Do you think it's stupid or tacky? Skip it, you're bound to find something that works for you.
This story originally appeared in Huffington, in the iTunes App store.