Cool(Kid) Weddings

My friend Abby alerted me that Pittsburgh will have its very own “alternative, indie bridal show” next month, Hand(made) in Marriage. Featuring the most twee and confusing parentheses since (500) Days of Summer!

I guess I’m not spending enough time in Lawrenceville, because I had no idea that Pittsburgh was “with it” enough to warrant its own hipster bridal show.  I want to go to the event just to see if it really is populated by cool kids or if there are mainly other poseurs like me.

If I leave doubting myself for being too un-crafty to design our own invites and too poor to pay a local vendor to do it for us, well, that’s the cost of investigation.  I need to know if Pittsburgh is secretly full of hep cats about to get married.  I’ll deal with any feelings of inadequacy when the time comes.

I need to get better a not second-guessing our wedding choices anyway.

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Hire the Specialists

I have at least two, possibly three copies of “Pittsburgh’s Best Wedding Professionals POCKET GUIDE.”

I am not sure why anyone bothered to put non-ad content into it.  It only exists for reasons of advertisement.  But somewhere along the line someone “wrote” “content” for this pocket-sized “book.”

And then ran it through multiple translations on Babelfish before converting it back to English.  Why would they do that, you ask?  I’m not sure, but I can tell that something had to happen more sinister than mere typos and grammatical shenanigans to result in copy that reads like this.

First there is a list of Dos and Don’ts.  Dos include “DO: Consider vendors that you see and talk to at bridal shows and/or see their ads in bridal publications” (thanks for the brilliant advice, bridal publication!) and “DO: Hire the specialists.”  (I just got chills.  Who are the specialists? What do they specialize in? What will happen if I hire the generalists?).

Then there is a list of the “Newest and Hottest Trends.”  Sure sure, they list trends that neither new nor hot, like candy buffets and photo booths.  But I don’t really care about those.  What fascinates me are the “trends” that, well, have been translated into Portuguese and then into Tagalog and then to German and back to English:

• “Signature monograms lightning.”
• “Signature crashes.” (It is totally possible “crashes” are a totally normal wedding thing I’ve never heard of.)
• “Brides changes dresses.”
• “In door or outside fireworks.”
• “Human tables.” (WHAT? Maybe at Nazi weddings.)

Also, sorry, but on the list of “the next big thing,” I found out that the next big thing is that “Cupcakes are retired.” And I have a bad feeling that Cupcakes will be shot by some punk two days before retirement.

It Begins: Dress Shopping

Yesterday marked the start of my wedding dress shopping, you know, sort of in the way Memorial Day marks the start of summer.  Like, technically summer doesn’t happen for almost another month, but nevertheless you’ve been acting like its summer since the first day the thermometer hit 80, BUT I DIGRESS.  I mean to say that I tried on white gowns, thinking about my wedding dress, but I was not REALLY wedding dress shopping.

Here is what I learned:

I am probably not going to be one of those awesome, breezy, no-nonsense, budget-savvy chicks who buys a white dress that isn’t marketed as a bridal gown.  At least I’m definitely not going to be buying a non-bridal wedding dress from BCBG/Maxazria, even though they have a wide selection of floor-length white dresses.

I tried on this dress first:

I am crazy for one-shoulder dresses right now.  But I realize it is a passing fad.  I don’t want to buy a dress for my wedding that will be an avocado fridge in a year.  Anyway, this dress was lovely, but about two inches too short.  Even when I took off the heels the salesperson provided, you could see my entire foot, not just a delicate hint of toe.  I’m not crazy tall (between 5’8″ and 5’9″, closer to one or the other depending on my posture), so I suspected it was an innate design flaw with that particular dress.  I was wrong.  I had the problem with each dress I tried in the store.

[Beyond the jump, more too-short dresses and a possibly-offensive RANT on body size and inept advertising]

The New Photobooth

I have a wedding trend prognostication!

While the U.S. version of Hole in the Wall only aired a few episodes (silly FOX!), I think there is an untapped market for “human tetris.”

Indie weddings!

Can’t you just imagine guests bending just so to fit through holes in the shapes of various types of moustaches?  And if they fail, they’ll fall into a pool of mint-infused elderberry punch.

I’m not teasing! If I had endless funds and god-like powers, I would actually want that at my wedding.

This post brought to you by Cold Medicine and the Letter W.

The Avocado Fridge Problem

I don’t want my wedding to look dated.

Wait.  Clarification:  if my wedding looks dated to my children, well, of course it does.  If it looks dated to a friend getting married in ten years, fine.  But I don’t want it to look dated at the moment it is happening to the people who are there.

I realize worrying about this is a waste of life.  I don’t understand wedding trends, at all.  I just pulled up The Knot’s lists of hot wedding trends for 2010, 2009, and 2008.  Half the items are the same throughout the years (variations on “rustic festive”), but others insist that something is the new something (e.g., “steel gray is the new chocolate brown”), implying that if you pick the old something, your guests will judge you for it.

So, here’s my problem.  I started consuming wedding images about five months ago.  In that time, I fell in love with certain design elements (like I mentioned the other day, the birdcage veil).  I assume those have been trendy for a while now, or they wouldn’t have trickled down into mainstream wedding literature.  My wedding isn’t for at least a year.  If I wear a birdcage veil, will I look like someone on vacay from three years ago?

If you have an Avocado fridge in your kitchen left over from the 1970s, there’s something charming about it (I’m talking aesthetics here, people, let’s just assume it still works and you aren’t regularly suffering from food poisoning).   If you buy a new avocado fridge today, it could have the “retro-chic” appeal of a milk glass cake stand, a  Knot-approved wedding trend for 2010 (which I’m guessing means something that’s been a staple of bloggy weddings since I was still in undergrad).

But what if you bought someone an avocado fridge in 1982?  Wouldn’t you be much more likely to get hit with the Present Face?  There’s a dead zone in the continuum from original to trendy to ubiquitous onward to retro-chic: played out.  And as much as I don’t want that for my wedding, I don’t have the time, or energy, and least of all the savvy to figure it out.