ByDesign - Fall/Winter '96

ByDesign Staff:

Editor: Christine Kreyling

Art Director: Lee Weidhaas

Contributing Writer: Kay West

Photography: Susan Adcock, Eric England,

and Gary Layda

Marriages may be made in heaven, but weddings are made right here on earth. A wedding is the one time when even the most design-unconscious couples are asked to make the kind of decisions usually reserved for the design professional. I remember from my own union 25 years ago that everyone—parents and priest, dressmaker and florist, caterer and baker—kept asking, “How should it look? What sounds do you want? It’s your day.”

They lied. Like most design rookies, I entered into the creative process with the boundless self-confidence of youth and inexperience. I would do it my way. I emerged three months later a chastened, albeit married, lady.

I was reminded of my education in nuptial realities on a recent Saturday, when I sat in a pew in the East End Methodist Church and watched a neighbor’s child plight her troth. It was the first installment of a wedding doubleheader.

I don’t go to many weddings anymore. At my age, the marriages of my peers are second-time-around affairs, usually handled in a discreetly minimalist style and attended by a few intimate friends. Meanwhile, the children of my peers are usually too busy climbing the career ladder to do more than co-habit. Two weddings in one day was an uncommon occurrence.

Later in the day, as I heard the strains of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” waft through the textured modernism of Vanderbilt’s Benton Chapel, I mused on the wedding-as-design. By the time the bride had made it to the receiving line, I had concluded that designing a wedding is like designing anything else. The person who is supposed to be in charge is actually serving a variety of clients with a multitude of special interests.

The clients are known, in real estate terms, as “stakeholders.” These are the people who own a part of the action. The same parents and parson, seamstress and flower-arranger, cook and cake-maker who tug their forelocks and ask the designer couple for instructions are just pretending that they want direction. Actually, they already know exactly what they want to do. They are just trying to figure out how to make to make the bride and groom agree with them.

Before you label me an embittered cynic or a weak sister, let me hasten to say that I am reasonably optimistic and remarkably strong-willed. Nevertheless, in the design of my own wedding, I was more often vanquished than victorious.

In reaction to the wartime austerities imposed on their own marriage, my parents urged me into elaborate lace and eggshell satin —with a train yet—when I really wanted the simplicity of cotton voile. The dressmaker tried to talk me into a veil and out of a hat. I settled for a floral crown. The caterer insisted that chicken livers wrapped in bacon would be just yummy. I responded that I loathe animal livers, no matter what the species. The baker stated unequivocally that a chocolate cake with chocolate icing—I can’t remember whether the cake or the icing was the most severe affront—would be, quite literally, tacky. I stuck to my sticky guns. The ceremony had to abide by the rules of the Roman Catholic Church, which are considerable. The priest permitted the elimination of the word “obey,” but that was about it.

There are also general economic and cultural factors to guide the design choices of the about-to-be-hitched. Dreaming of champagne on the Swan Lawn at Cheekwood is futile if the parental budget, or your own, requires beer in the neighborhood rec hall. There’s no point in talking about a simple gathering for a chosen few in the family homestead if your parents’ religion and your inheritance depend on an hour’s worth of High Mass, complete with vestments, before you are considered to be properly joined.

Within all these squeezing parameters, the bridal couple must still decide on what to wear at the ceremony, what to eat and drink and listen to at the party afterward. Like architects with a corporate client—or a graphic designer in the music biz looking to push the outer edge of the CD envelope—they have responsibility, but no power.

There are some aggressive couples, however, who seize their day and run with it. They jettison traditional values and indulge in self-expression.

I have read of—but unfortunately never been invited to—ceremonies in which the happy couple recited their vows while on mule-back, or balanced on a high wire, or right before they hurtled down a giant water slide. The latter is a variation on the bungee wedding, defined as saying “I do” and then literally taking the plunge.

A pair to the southwest of Nashville staged their nuptials on the future site of their house trailer. Their cake was in the shape of a double-wide, and their pet German shepherds served as ushers and flower girls.