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I got married on a goat farm. Our wedding pictures involved chickens, and a vintage school bus-turned-coop, and holding hands in a field at sunset. I wore cowboy boots underneath my dress. My husband wore a tan seersucker suit. Dinner was a NC-style pig pickin.’ Afterwards, there was pie.
Of course, there were copious amounts of DIY. We handmade the invitations, which featured hand-stamped goats and pigs and a vintage font called Rockwell (to be honest, my husband and mother made most of the invitations one night at 2am, while I lay on the couch with my laptop finishing a deadline). My husband made 100-plus bottles of his own recipe hot sauce, which we bottled and decorated with handmade labels to use in lieu of place cards. My friends and I arranged all the flowers ourselves, in Mason jars (naturally) and old-fashioned glass milk bottles. I made burlap table runners, and hand-painted tiny wooden dolls for our cake (pie) toppers. My dad and brother made banana pudding.
I loved my wedding, and wouldn’t have changed a thing (well, maybe I would have ixnayed the burlap table runners, which left my house, car and tablecloths stinking of turpentine).
But it’s very clear, looking back, that a Future Person looking at our wedding photos will be able to pinpoint our wedding date to the decade, if not the actual year. The Farm Wedding (and its close cousins, the Rustic Wedding, the Vintage Wedding and the DIY Wedding) is the dominant matrimonial aesthetic of the 21st century.
The Farm/Rustic/Vintage/DIY Wedding neatly telegraphs the values of today, values we see over and over in New Domesticity: DIY over purchased, artisan over mass-produced, rustic rather than high-tech, small and personal over large and generic. If you look at any of the popular wedding blogs, which have been multiplying like fruit flies for the past several years, you’ll be inundated with pictures of vintage A-line wedding dresses, grooms with 19th century ringmaster mustaches, antique typewriters decorating the guest book table, appetizers of home-pickled carrots and radishes, bouquets of zinnias and rosemary grown in the bride’s backyard, friends-turned-officiants conducting ceremonies while wearing bow ties and bowler hats.
Though this aesthetic claims to be all about honoring tradition and the past (hence the vintage typewriters and 1950s wedding dresses, etc. etc.), it’s actually a radical departure from tradition. In fact, the DIY-ness of these weddings is both a result and a celebration of our current culture of hyper-individualism, a culture that’s VERY 21st century.
Take the wedding cake. A big white wedding cake, a tradition (in the West, at least) since the 19th century, seems impossibly generic to many of us. So instead we choose desserts that, rather than representing tradition, represent our own values and experiences. My wedding had local NC pies – pecan, muscadine grape, etc. – from a great local bakery, plus a pick-n-mix candy bar with candies from all the countries my husband and I have visited. Dessert offerings from weddings I’ve attended in the past few years have included: plates of stroopwafel cookies and salty licorice (the groom was Dutch), a dessert truck with Baked Alaska cupcakes and moose-shaped cookies (the bride and groom met in Alaska), a groom’s cake shaped like a brain (the groom did neuroscience research).
All this individualism, I’d venture, makes wedding planning more time-consuming than in the past. I could have ordered wedding invitations and been done with it. Instead, I designed the invitations on Word (after weeks of looking at designs online), designed and ordered pig and goat stamps from a stamp-making company, spent a day of my New York vacation sourcing paper and envelopes, compared paper and envelope prices online, ordered paper and envelopes from various different companies (the returned the ones that didn’t work), bought a paper cutter to cut the paper to invitation size and spent a night cutting paper with my mother, sourced and ordered striped ribbons to fix to the envelopes, read numerous online reviews about the best adhesive to make ribbons stick to paper and finally purchased a Xylon sticker-maker, Photoshopped my Word design and my goat and pig images together, printed all my invitations, then spend another two days (well, my husband and mother did) collating the invitations, punching them with hole-punches, tying them together with raffia, sticking them in envelopes, affixing ribbon to the envelopes with the Xylon, putting the envelopes in larger envelopes, hand-addressing the larger envelopes, and stamping the envelope flaps with the pig and goat stamps I’d designed.
The whole process probably took about 80 man-hours, and – guess what! – ended up being MORE EXPENSIVE than if I’d simply ordered invitations online. In fact, the whole wedding, in all its DIY simplicity (pig roast! keg beer! self-arranged flowers!) was not exactly cheap. If I factored in my own labor hours (and those of my friends and husband), I daresay it would have cost far MORE than the average American wedding (which is something like $28,000).
This isn’t the point, not totally. I loved the DIY aspect, loved being creative and making things with my husband and friends and mother. It was great fun, and created the memories that will last forever (the slaphappiness of being awake making wedding invitations at 2am will do that). Yet I do want to point out that these Rustic/Vintage/Farm/DIY weddings are part of current culture of “simplicity” that is anything but simple, “tradition” that is anything but traditional, and “DIY” that winds up feeling more complicated than nuclear engineering.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who stayed for several nights in a row hand-stamping cocktail napkins??? Stories of your own simple/rustic/vintage/DIY weddings?
