Ah, springtime — otherwise known as wedding season, when the quarterly returns of the matrimony-industrial complex go through the roof. Not that it's so different from the rest of the year. Wedding-themed reality shows dominate low-rent cable networks. Bridal magazines survived the great print journalism die-off with nary a scratch. Love is all around.
America's preoccupation with weddings can feel claustrophobic to anyone over the age of 25 — even me, and I'm not getting married anytime soon.
But two years ago, my best friend got engaged. A few months later, she began sending me links to wedding blogs. The deeper she journeyed into the dark heart of wedding planning, the more links she sent. Through her research, I became aware of a strangely compelling, incredibly irritating trend: the hipster wedding.
Hipsterism, the lifestyle choice of young, middle-class people attempting to refine the middle class, emerged roughly a decade ago. Now that hipsters have received their MFAs and reluctantly settled into careers, they're getting married. But the hipster aesthetic is defined by childish spontaneity and half-assism. Tackling a ritual associated with becoming a card-carrying adult can be a problem.
The solution? Infuse the ceremony itself with the trappings of hipsterdom. The wedding then becomes the hipster's last stand, his final opportunity to show friends and family what a fun and individualistic middle-class young person he is, before he becomes just another mortgage holder.
In the last few years, a hipster-wedding Bizarro World has come into being, one replete with conventions just as strict as those its creators longed to escape. The betrothed hipster must adhere to a fascistic regimen of self-expression, upcycled jam jars, and unparalleled, painstaking wedding-favor design. This world, though marked by forced whimsy, mirrors the mainstream in its object fetishism and pantomime. Instead of roses, it has bicycles; instead of heirloom silver, handmade crafts.
The new hipster-wedding regime subverts an adult ritual with signifiers of childhood, puts quotes around a serious commitment. As it denies adulthood, the hipster wedding so denies that it took just as long and cost just as much as its non-hipster equivalent. To follow are its key characteristics.
