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Photographs by Al Horton, Joanna Klein and Warwick Photography
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Moving toward...
Destination locations. More couples are opting for a tropical island or mountain resort instead of a hometown. Today’s technology—computers, Black-Berries, cell phones, instant messaging, faxes—allows you to plan your wedding from any location, and friends and family welcome the excuse for a minivacation. (If you have your ceremony at your honeymoon destination, though, be prepared for guests to linger.)
Themes, skillfully orchestrated. Repetition—which is what a theme is—holds the various parts of a wedding celebration together visually and conceptually, making the experience memorable and the photographs stunning. Consultants suggest picking up on an interesting color combination, a specially designed monogram, a college or university, a place with a special meaning to the couple. The theme can be highlighted in the save-the-date mailing, the invitations, choice of bridal wear, even the tables at the wedding reception.
Save-the-date cards. “Three or four years ago, a handful of brides started using them,” says Marilyn Moll-Ruggeri, a wedding consultant and owner of Dazzle. “In the past year and a half, everyone has been sending them.” The cards are mailed about six months before the ceremony, announcing the date, place and time of the wedding. They may also include information on hotels, flights or rental cars—anything guests need to plan the trip.
Photojournalism. Posed photos and lineup shots are less important now than candid shots that capture moments, gestures and interactions. And forget sticky albums—photographers are using digital technology to create professionally designed wedding books (see p. 89).
Facing the guests. Traditionally, couples have faced an altar, the person marrying them or each other. Today, more couples are turning to face their guests during the ceremony.
Bigger, bolder flowers. The trend is toward bigger and fewer flowers. Foliage, now available in many textures and colors, is becoming as important as the flowers. One recent bride carried branches of Japanese maple against her ivory dress. Berries are big, too: Hypernicum has been hybridized, resulting in a choice of tomato-red, coral, yellow, coffee and lime-green berries. New flowers include miniature calla lilies and a green rose that fades to pale butter as it opens.
Creative cakes. You don’t have to stand a tiny bride and groom on top of your cake. Brides are using Swarovski crystals to decorate cakes and crowning them with custom silver monograms. Even the cakes themselves are changing: One new style is to tier cakes in different flavors, designs and colors, like stacked gifts.
Breaking the mold. Centerpieces don’t all have to be the same size. Some can be strikingly vertical, others low and full. Music doesn’t have to come straight from the hymnal or wedding book. Couples are choosing jazz or Broadway favorites for the ceremony.
Presents for your guests. Instead of throwaway party favors, try meaningful tokens—perhaps a tiny book of romantic poetry, a monogrammed wineglass or a rare tulip bulb with a note reading “Love grows.”
Easing away from ...
Cutesy themes reminiscent of prom. For a wedding around Valentine’s Day, floral designer Dale Rohman shunned pink hearts and chose a winter-forest theme: evergreen trees, bare birch branches, white lights and white spring flowers peeking up through the snow.
Pastels. In everything from invitations to bridesmaids’ dresses and centerpieces, stronger, richer colors have taken over. Even engagement rings are featuring colored diamonds, says Jay Heiseler of Neustaedter’s Fine Jewelry. Diamonds come in every color of the rainbow, and the colors are rarer (red being the rarest) and more expensive than white diamonds.
Tight bouquets. Josie Littlepage of Cosmopolitan Events sees brides choosing “a very natural look, with stems exposed, maybe tied loosely with long, flowing ribbons or raffia. It’s a garden feel.”
Elaborate receiving lines. Consultant Moll-Ruggeri sees many couples abandoning the long, formal receiving line after the ceremony and choosing instead “a simple receiving line—bride, groom and parents—at the reception.”
Church photography. Many sacred spaces discourage photography or offer less-than-ideal lighting. “Lately more and more bridal parties are doing things away from the church,” says Al Horton of Horton Photography. “I may take a traditional shot of the bride and groom at the altar, because Mom wants it to go with the picture from her own wedding years ago, but usually church interiors have really busy backgrounds or poor lighting.” Horton finds bridal couples choosing to go outdoors for photos—or at least outside the church. “Architecture makes a very interesting backdrop,” he says.
Garters and flung bouquets. These two reception stalwarts are being bypassed with increasing frequency. People are marrying at a later age, and watching their friends and relatives scrape around for these things seems less and less attractive.
Boring dinners. Try bite-sized food, monogrammed food, comfort food, organic food, sushi ...
Environmental havoc. No more rice-throwing (birdseed’s still welcome); no more releases of balloons or butterflies. Too many creatures have perished or choked in the quest for the picturesque.
Setting the scene
Brides and grooms want their wedding day to be memorable—for themselves, of course, but also for their family and friends. Couples may choose extravagance, gifting every guest with a special basket of goodies. They may choose affinity, jetting off with a small cluster of intimates to a secret ceremony at a special location. They may crave the romance of a beach or country wedding or a Scottish, medieval, Asian or Moroccan theme. But one of the biggest trends is the complete package—a wedding ceremony and reception that is produced as tightly as a Broadway hit.
Erin Schulte, a producer for Exclusive Events Inc., says that themed weddings often center on where the couple met or on hobbies and interests they share. Moll-Ruggeri, owner of Dazzle, recently consulted on a wedding for a couple who shared a love of St. Louis. “They had great memories of lots of local places, so there was an Arch table, a Busch Stadium table, an Art Museum table and so on, with centerpieces and place cards designed to match.”
Schulte worked with a Los Angeles couple, both in the entertainment business, who wanted—what else?—a movie-themed wedding. “Each table at the reception had a centerpiece that highlighted a different favorite movie,” she says. “There actually was a small set built to go around the dance floor, stage, lobby, doorways and so on. When I say ‘set,’ I mean an actual re-creation of one of their favorite movie sets, like a diner, a car and so forth.
“Getting the set environment built was not very expensive, and it really made an amazing impression on the guests,” Schulte notes. “It also made for wonderful photos.”
Another couple built their reception around jazz. “At one section of their reception site they recreated a jazz bar complete with cozy tables, mood lighting and couches.” And what would a jazz bar be without a smoky, muted feel? “They went so far as to have a very light haze fog the area,” Schulte says. “It was a great touch.”
“People are really breaking outside of the box right now,” Schulte adds. “They’re not just doing ‘butterfly’ weddings or black-and-white or Cinderella weddings. They are having amazing creative environments specially made for them, using not only special-effect lighting but specially built props, sets and great furniture—and what is great is that it really does not incur that much expense.”
Over the rainbow
Littlepage, owner of Cosmopolitan Events, often builds a theme around nothing more than a color the bride and groom both love: “Then I choose a contrasting color and design everything associated with the wedding around those elements.”
She recently planned an all-white wedding, which, she says, is actually unusual these days. As she talked with the bride, they decided to bring in a lot of greenery, without colored flowers, to offset the stark whiteness. “It started to take on a jungle feel,” she says. Table decorations included tall trees, and hanging from the trees were votive candles—another huge trend. What began as a formal, almost clinical wedding morphed into something pure, lush, fantastic.
Gina Tramelli, an independent wedding consultant with Saint Louis Wedding Design and owner of Carta Bella, a custom-stationery store, sees the use of color exploding. “As recently as five years ago, when I started in this business, it was a question of whether to use white or ivory paper,” she says. “Now it’s pretty much anything goes.” Invitations are often elaborate and ornate, with multiple insertions. “I hate to say it, but everyone follows the trends of Martha Stewart,” Tramelli says with a grin, “and she introduced color to weddings. It could begin as simply as adding a colored ribbon to a traditional Crane invitation—but brides are carrying this through to their place cards, wedding programs, save-the-date cards, tags for welcome baskets, thank-yous, even the aisle runners.”
Chocolate—the color, not the confection—is at the top of many brides’ lists right now. “I use it for invitations and print lighter colors, like light pink, on top,” Tramelli says. For one recent wedding, she went bold, tying a chocolate invitation folder with a lime-green ribbon. These two colors were paired in numerous other ways, and the effect, she says, was stunning.
Floral designer Rohman recently used lime-green hydrangeas with lavender scabiosa, belladonna-blue delphiniums, a jade-green rose and cream lisianthus. “Lime green makes other colors brighter and stronger,” he says. “I just did a wedding—and this sounds horrible, but it was great—in purples, chocolate brown and lime green. Pastels are in the past.”
Be creative
-Bored with demure, predictable wedding jewelry? Adam Foster (Adam Foster Fine Art Jewelry, 2702 Macklind, 314-771-3390) will design jewelry to match the lace in your dress—or use any other point of inspiration in your wedding. He recently designed a lacy necklace in sterling and white and blue topaz; for another bride, he picked up the pattern hidden inside deep pleats of her dress. He’s done hair combs and pins, every kind of jewelry, even 14-karat gold garters. “You can have gold spun thin enough to be completely flexible,” he says. “Anything can be made to match anything.”
-Fragrance is hard to come by, with so many flowers hybridized. Try stargazer or Casablanca lilies and white stock, which carries the scent of cloves, and keep the doors of the church or temple shut for several hours before the ceremony to capture the fragrance.
-Immediately after the ceremony, take a few minutes to be alone together. Don’t let the fullness of the moment evaporate in a crowd of well-wishers or get pushed aside by happy bustle.
-Donate leftover food from the reception to a food pantry.
Rites of passage
A wedding that merges cultural and ethnic traditions can be a memorable and deeply moving affair. As more and more interfaith marriages take place, brides and grooms are breaking away from the Western white gown/black tux tradition to plan colorful, richly meaningful weddings that incorporate faith or family customs from other countries.
Not only are the resulting ceremonies visually striking and compelling, but the guests also often play a more significant role.
“In what we would consider a traditional wedding, the guests are like an audience, but in the Buddhist tradition, the ceremony incorporates the whole congregation,” says Littlepage. “In the ‘water ceremony,’ everyone in attendance pours water over the hands of the bride and groom. And Pakistani weddings are pure fun! There are at least two days of festivities.”
Moll-Ruggeri recently helped plan a wedding that merged Hindu and Christian elements. The bride, Priya Luther, is of Indian descent, and the groom, Mike Bazzani, has a Christian background. The bride’s family had many things brought over from India, including fabrics for dresses and an array of foods. “The fabrics and colors used throughout the ceremonies and reception made this a very memorable wedding,” Moll-Ruggeri says. “I was invited to participate in a very private ceremony, the mehndi ceremony, with all of the women in the family. Our hands and feet were painted with intricate, lacy designs, using henna dyes that last for days, if not weeks.”
Dina Zehngut was living in Arizona when she became engaged to Evan Weiner early in 2005. The couple was planning an Orthodox Jewish ceremony and had felt a real sense of community in St. Louis when Weiner lived here, so they decided to have their wedding in St. Louis—and import what they needed. “We got a lot of stuff from New York City,” says Zehngut, mentioning “the kittel, which is a white robe that the groom wears. It wasn’t like we were going to find that just anywhere in St. Louis.”
The Orthodox Jewish ceremony is brief, but the bride and groom are treated like a king and queen throughout the festivities, and guests participate in several rituals. “Everyone who comes celebrates and should be involved,” Zehngut explains. “They dance for us and entertain us.”
Inviting disaster
With wedding invitations and programs designed more elaborately and printed in more vivid colors, with multiple inserts and special overlays and printing techniques ... more can go wrong. “Yet brides are so busy that the invitations get put off to the last minute,” says Tramelli of Carta Bella. “The first question I ask is: How many invitations do you need? When the bride says 400, I ask if she’s inviting 800 guests. Then she realizes her mistake.”
Unless you’re inviting far more single people than married ones, you can halve your guest-list count for the invitations. Finalize that list before ordering the invitations, though. “It’s very expensive to go back and reorder a few more invitations,” Tramelli says. “We suggest padding the invitation order by 25, although with custom pieces that may cost $15 to $25 per piece, it’s hard to justify that quantity, so I may tell them to just get 10 to 15 extra.”
Envelopes are a different story: Always order extra envelopes, which are relatively cheap, in case any mistakes are made during the addressing process. If you’re using a calligrapher, that person may specify a certain quantity, but a good rule of thumb is 25 extra. Also, if you’re cutting it close timewise, ask that the envelopes be sent ahead of time, to give the person addressing them a head start. Find your calligrapher well in advance of the wedding and tell him or her when to expect the invitations.
For the printed invitations and programs, proofreading of the order is critical, both for spelling and for appearance. “A couple may like a certain font in the order book—maybe it’s a monogram, for example—but they might not like it when it’s actually in print,” Tramelli says.
The advent of the Internet and personal computers make proofing a great tool, too, to make adjustments before the final print. The invitation company can get full-color proofs from the computer—often this is done online—so you can check the color in pictures, graphics, even ink.
“You would not believe the things that are commonly misspelled,” Tramelli says. “The bride and groom’s names, their parents’ names, the date of the wedding! I encourage couples to have several people proofread the invitation before signing off on it. One of the best ways to proofread is to look at it from right to left, so you’re actually looking at each word and not just skimming.”
Before placing the invitation order, recap everything, from the ink color to the style of printing, be it thermography, engraving or letterpress. Verify the font and the type size. “Mistakes happen when people are rushing,” says Tramelli, “then there’s not a lot of time to reorder.”
Before dumping all those beautiful invitations into the nearest mailbox, take a complete set, with all maps, directions, response cards and embellishments (bows, etc.) to the post office to be weighed and measured. “It’s embarrassing if your invitation arrives with postage due or if it’s returned to you,” Tramelli says. “And anytime you have a bow or an overwrap, have the invitations hand-canceled. They can get torn up and damaged going through the postal machines.”
It can be a challenge to find a post office that will hand-cancel 200 invitations. Tramelli recommends going downtown to the main post office, going to a branch during its off hours or asking for the cancellation stamper and offering to do it for them.
Words that matter
What gets lost in the flurry of wedding preparations? The words that bind two lives into one. “Contemporary brides and grooms are more involved in choosing wedding napkins than in thinking about the most important vow of their life,” grumbles the Rev. Suzanne Meyer of First Unitarian Church.
Some agonize for days, of course, writing their own vows. But Monsignor Jim Telthorst of Our Lady of Sorrows says that the trend has swung back to traditional vows—which comes as a relief, because often couples were unintentionally writing conditions and loopholes into the commitment. (“As long as we both shall love” instead of “as long as we both shall live” is the classic example.) A wedding is a communal celebration, not an individual one, in Telthorst’s view: “I liken it to the president taking his oath. He doesn’t get to write his own oath. He has to use the one that we, the people, give him.
The Rev. Susan Nanny of Christ Church Cathedral blesses couples of all beliefs. “People are still spiritual, and they want the language to match their experience with the divine,” she says, noting that they sometimes alter pre-existing vows. “I applaud people who want that integrity.”
How should couples choose their vows? “With extreme care,” says Meyer. “The first time you will hear them is on your wedding day, and the second time will be when your spouse reminds you during your first fight.”
—Additional reporting by Amber Schmisseur
