If you look closely at the APW sidebar, you’ll see a bunch of ads for the APW book that say things like, “It’s okay if you don’t throw the bouquet,” and, “Your mom doesn’t need that aisle runner.” When I got married reassurances like these were my lifeblood, because the idea of any of that kitschy nonsense working its way into my wedding was terrifying, on a visceral level (which probably had more to do with a lot of deeply ingrained fears about tradition and becoming a wife than with the bouquet toss itself). And while it’s still very reassuring to hear that you don’t need an aisle runner when the WIC saying you definitely do and you’re just trying to figure out how you can afford to feed anyone at the damn wedding, do you want to know the dirty secret of being a married lady working for a wedding website? Now that I’m almost four years out from the day, I have a deep and abiding love for the kitsch.
That’s right. I love tulle and bouquet tosses and everything else that made me scrunch up my nose when someone brought it up during my own wedding planning. Maybe it’s because the further out from my wedding I get, the more I realize that there are a lot of performative aspects to weddings, that weddings themselves are a form of kistch, and if that’s true, then maybe it’s okay if not every part of the day has a deeper meaning. Maybe it’s okay if you just do things because you get a kick out of how silly they are. In fact, Hipster Maddie thinks that the bigger the indie wedding movement gets, the more important it is for us to embrace the kitschy parts of wedding tradition that gave rise to the movement to begin with, if only in the name of not taking things quite so seriously.
So today we want to know: what wedding kitsch are you embracing? Are you going for the old something borrowed, something blue quartet? (It turns out Meg and I both did.) Tossing the bouquet? Are you excited? Wary because you’re only doing it to make your mom happy? Are you reclaiming any wedding kitsch in a way that you’re particularly excited about? (Like, hint, the APW staff is obsessed with this generally badass reclaiming of the garter toss.) Let us know. Married folks, tell us what wedding kitsch you embraced or rejected. Would you do it any differently now? I, for one, agreed to wear a sixpence in my shoe on my wedding day (a tradition in Michael’s family. They have a real sixpence!), but at the last minute realized it was going to fall out of my strappy sandal. So you know what I did? I put that sucker in my zebra-striped pasty and danced the night away.
But before we get into the open thread, we also wanted to use this post as an opportunity to introduce our newest How-To series starting this week, appropriately themed: Kitschy Wedding Crafts. Inspired by the commentary on our Grocery Store Cake post and the comments on this open thread, as well as a desire to show the wedding industry that you don’t need to be a professional artist to make sexy wedding decor, we spent three days crafting tutorials from items found mostly at The Dollar Store and Party City. Get ready for a heavy dose of glitter and tissue paper, folks. I think this might be our best How-To series yet.
Photo by APW Sponsor Allison Andres
