The Fake Poor Bride: Confessions of a Wedding Planner to the 1%

THE REAL POOR DL READER. PAY WALL, OP. P A Y W A L L

OP, the article is paywalled.

The Fake Poor Bride - by Xochitl Gonzalez

Sunday mornings, for wedding planners, are reserved for prayer. Not because it’s a particularly pious profession but because that’s the day when clients who were married on Saturday figure out if they’re happy or not. Should they choose unhappiness, Sunday is when they decide whom to blame. And Monday is when the emails come. I say “decide” because weddings are funny affairs—tense, expensive, fraught with emotion. They are revisited—by the couple, by the family, by the person paying the bills—time and again. They mark the beginning of a couple’s new life but sometimes of other things too: family feuds, broken friendships, a long hangover of fiscal regret. So even if the party went great, on Sunday the wedding planner prays. Will the email be full of joy and praise? Or will it be one of complaint? Back when I was a luxury-wedding planner in New York City, my business partner and I once got an email from a bride, written as she helicoptered off to her honeymoon, saying that her wedding had been a “transcendent experience.” A call from the bride’s mother directly followed. “Repeat after me,” she said. “I am bad at my job. I should never do this job again.” Sometimes the clients just need to vent. Sometimes they threaten to sue.

The work of a luxury-wedding planner is only partly about the planning. Yes, you help the couple plan what you hope will be a stunning event—but your main job is to be a professional wedding friend. You’re the person who cares if the bow on the favor has swallow or inverse tails, or if the maid of honor is being a passive-aggressive bitch when none of the bride’s other friends wants to talk about it anymore. The family is paying you to care as much as they do.

When I became a wedding planner, no one in my own family could comprehend my utility. My grandparents, who raised me, had what was called a “football wedding.” They rented the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and piled tinfoil-wrapped heroes on a table. People would shout out what sandwich they wanted, and another guest would toss it across the room. “How complicated could a wedding be?” they wondered. Had I chosen to be a professional mud wrestler, I do not think it could have confounded them more.

So whenever one of our events was featured in a bridal magazine, I would bring it to family occasions and show it off the way other people might show off pictures of their babies. “See,” I would say, pointing to a dreamy sailcloth tent glowing with custom-made chandeliers. “There was nothing but a field here. We built all of this.”

Unfortunately, this only added to the confusion. “Don’t they realize they could have bought a house with all of this money?” I would have to explain that my clients didn’t need a house. They already had one. They probably had several.

A few years after the recession, I did a lavish wedding on Long Island. The bride was stressing about putting a custom lining on her invitations that would add another couple thousand to the already large stationery bill. She and the groom had been given a seven-figure sum to spend both on their wedding and on buying and decorating their new home, and the bride had a thing for mid-century-modern furniture. Was the liner worth more than a Wassily chair? She went back and forth, back and forth. I couldn’t say a thing, but finally her mother reached her limit: “We’re rich!” she cried out in exasperation. “Get the liners!”

Months later, the same mother, while admiring the tent we had spent days erecting for the reception, said, in total seriousness, “I hate that it’s only being used for one night. I wish we could find some homeless people to stay here when we’re done.”

I once got a call from a woman in a panic: Her daughter was getting married in a few weeks and she needed my partner and me to save this wedding. She offered no further details over the phone, insisting that we come uptown to her apartment so she could properly convey the scale of the conundrum. Right before she hung up the phone she whispered, “By the way, I’m very, very rich.”

And she was! She lived in one of those opulent places with an elevator that opened up into the apartment itself, because that’s how sprawling it was. A maid in a uniform greeted us and escorted us down a long, art-lined hallway and into the library, where the mother of the bride was waiting.

She explained the dilemma. Her daughter was embarrassed by her family’s wealth, and had been living as a closeted rich person for years—her friends had no idea. The bride had refused to let her mother have anything to do with the wedding, because if her mom got involved, the jig would be up. Everyone would see she’d just been cosplaying poverty. And so, armed with information from the internet and her mother’s checkbook, the young woman had gone off and planned what she imagined was an “average wedding.”

With the event just weeks away, the mother had started poking around and realized, This is terrible! Her daughter didn’t just have conflicted ideas about her own privilege. She also had bad taste—or at least unfortunate notions of what the “average” bride wants at her wedding: things like jam jars for wineglasses, picnic tables for seating, a limited bar.

Her daughter could pretend all she wanted, the mother said, but their friends and family knew that they were rich and were expecting a nice affair. After much argument, they compromised: They would hire a wedding planner. And the only wedding planner in all of New York they could agree on was me, probably because while many of my competitors were specializing in opulence, I had cornered the market in “understated luxury.”

The mother insisted that we meet right away because the bride was planning to reach out and hire us the next day, and the mother wanted me to be clear on how it was going to work. My job, in addition to making sure the wedding was not an embarrassment, was to say yes to everything the daughter asked for. If the bride questioned what something cost, I was to say it was “already included in the contract.” The mother didn’t care how expensive anything was; she would cover it secretly. Did this sound crazy? Absolutely. Did I need the money? Yes.

I was amazed by how well the strategy worked. “You could serve these baby lamb chops,” I would say, to which the bride would reply, “But is that going to be more expensive than pigs in a blanket?,” and I would assure her, as I had been hired to do, that everything was in the contract. But then one day the bride proclaimed her desire to reduce the carbon footprint of the wedding by having edible escort cards. The escort card is the folded-over piece of card stock that tells a guest where to sit. The bride had the idea to stick toothpicks with little tags showing the names and table numbers into bacon-wrapped dates, combining appetizer and escort card and thus saving the environment.

I nodded yes, and then emailed the mother in a panic, something to the effect of: “It’s going to look like a table full of floating turds! What are we going to do?”

“For Christ’s sake, why can’t you be my daughter?” she wrote back.

The mother said she’d grown up poor like me but, unlike me, had married well. “Marry rich!” she would tell me. “It’s so fun!” I still haven’t had a chance to give this a try, but I suspect that she’s right. We agreed: When you have more money than God, what better way to spend some of it than to throw other people a luxuriously good time?

Anyway, they say that there are no accidents, but the daughter, in town for wedding things, logged on to her mother’s computer and saw our entire exchange. She insisted, quite understandably, that I be fired immediately.

When my business partner and I began planning weddings, in 2003, America was in a wedding craze, nurtured by an abundance of magazines: Bride’s, Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Town & Country Weddings, Inside Weddings, InStyle Weddings. The Wedding Planner had hit theaters in 2001. Then we had Bridezillas and Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? Soon you could scour wedding blogs all night: Style Me Pretty and Weddingbee and The Bridal Bar (and my very own blog at the time, Always a Blogsmaid). On the Fridays before weddings, I used to binge-watch Say Yes to the Dress to calm my nerves—at least these weren’t my clients.

Ah, fuck it. The article would take 20 posts to paste here, and I don't have that kind of time for you cheap cunts!

Please keep on posting the article, OP!

Full article:

R8 is to me what Kim Kardashian is to no-talent fame whores.

A HERO!!!!

The author enabled this asinine crap and now is making fun of it for an audience that views itself as intellectuals.

Why would the Atlantic publish this shit? It's not as if people having a burning desire to know what goes on at ultra-rich weddings.

R8 Thank you!

R10 They were probably hoping for some juicy dish. But since the clam is still active in the industry, she won't name and shame her worst ex-clients.

[quote]Or is it wasteful white nonsense?

I don't know what 'white' would have to do with it. There are plenty of cultures that place a premium on (multi-day, even) wedding extravaganzas.

Google Earth can take a photo of my porch right now- but they can't find a submarine thingy in the ocean?