Earlier this summer, Taylor Swift — arguably the ultimate millennial — married Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce in a reported multimillion-dollar ceremony inside an 820,000-square-foot entertainment complex, with nearly 1,000 guests and Adam Sandler officiating. To some, the spectacle felt less like a beginning than an ending: the swan song of an era of decadent weddings.
Over the past few decades, the American wedding industry has ballooned into a roughly $100 billion business. Raised on shows like Say Yes to the Dress and endless feeds of celebrity and influencer nuptials, many millennials came to see enormous expense as not just normal but expected — custom gowns worn for a single day, greenhouses’ worth of flowers, live bands, destination bachelorette weekends, and personalised welcome bags for every guest. In a 2024 survey, 56 percent of couples reported going into debt to pay for their weddings.
But a shift appears to be underway as Gen Z couples begin to marry. Rather than amplifying the spectacle, many are rejecting it. “The wedding industrial complex is such a scam,” one bride-to-be planning a small, remote ceremony put it. “Everything — venues, dresses, flowers, and catering — is up-charged and so expensive. Massive weddings feel like a performance of perfection and status.”
As a result, eloping and courthouse weddings — which cost around $120 on average — are back in vogue, along with small restaurant dinners in place of banquet halls. Cost is a major driver amid economic precarity, but so is fatigue with tradition and waste. “Who wants to buy hundreds of tea candles and then have them sit in a garage for years?” said one Gen Z bride who married at a Mexican restaurant with about 25 guests.
Even more traditional Gen Z ceremonies look different: vintage dresses sourced for cost and sustainability, fewer wedding parties, and film photography over hours of posed shots. A generation overexposed online is also keeping its weddings notably private — famously, no one knew Zendaya and Tom Holland had married until the pair appeared on a red carpet wearing rings. “Weddings are now engineered for optics and how they’ll appear in content rather than how they feel in real life,” one bride said. “I hate that.” The real question the trend poses is whether these celebrations can return to what they are at their core: rituals marking the start of a marriage, rather than a performance.
