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| One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding | 
 enlarge | Author: Rebecca Mead
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $4.88
You Save: $21.07 (81%)
New (10) Used (10) from $4.85
Avg. Customer Rating:  22 reviews
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 395.22
Publication Date: May 10, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new, may have remainder mark/cover wear due to shelf storage.. Ready to ship!
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| Customer Reviews:
 Quite remarkable July 16, 2007
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
This book should be read by anyone in the process of getting married. I'm not the type person who is particularly interested in weddings, at least from the touchy, feely perspective; however, this book gives excellent insight into the strategies used by the wedding industry to squeeze every possible dollar from prospective brides, grooms, and families. Particularly interesting were some of the aspects of weddings that are conventionally considered "traditional" but are really conceived by the wedding industry itself. What really makes this book remarkable is that the author doesn't just stop with an extensive expose of the industry itself. She gives thoughtful insight questions such as: why in a "modern" society of feminism and double incomes are women driven to assume the (arguably sexist) role of a stereotypical bride and why is this one big day worth such extravagant expense to so many people?
 Single MEN need to read this book...... July 15, 2007
19 out of 20 found this review helpful
It's the bits of wedding trivia that I liked. Like how many people know that pre WW2 most brides didn't have diamond wedding rings. Then DeBeers discovered they could sell rings and link them to love and marriage. Now I knew that brides of the past rarely wore a fancy white dress. One need only look at wedding pictures from before 1950 to see this.
Who knew how much most marriages cost these days and how short a marriage it often turns out to be. All to show off to people that you have more money than you do, or show off the fact that dispite all odds, someone actually wanted to marry you.
No doubt all those who make big bucks off couples who marry, like wedding planners, florists, cake makers, rental places and a plethora of other businesses wont like this book one bit. But those who will are those with some common sense and feet planted firmly on the ground. Parents who may secretly hope their daughter doesn't get engaged. Or the bride and groom who have better things to do with their hard earned money than blow it on one day, that can never live up to the fantasy they have created in their heads. I also want to note how bad I feel for so many men who are hounded by the bride to be about how the wedding day is HER day. Run men run ...is my advise because any woman who is more concerned about HER production and not your feelings may mean divorce down the road.
I really hope more men read this book. As the mother of a son who married a lovely woman in a small ceremony with just family, I am so pleased that their money went into buying a home they can afford.
And yes I do agree with the author when it comes to women who wear white even if its their second or third etc wedding.
And I find it refreshing that the author even touched the delicate subject of what weddings were and what they have become. That until the last 10-20 years the holiness of marriage and a true sense of commitment is so often lost.
And BRAVO to the author for reminding straight on, Americans brides about the cheap labour that is producing the labour intensive goods that the bride wants for her wedding. Often in sweat shops. Something the wedding industry doesn't want you to know about.
The book is excellent about discussing the domino effect that spending big on a wedding, may mean bigger money problems down the road or big money issues that need to be discussed BEFORE a guy even buys an engagement ring.
 Cynical look at weddings reflects on author July 13, 2007
11 out of 23 found this review helpful
One Perfect Day by Rebecca Mead is subtitled: The Selling of the American Wedding, and it's clear that's just how the author views weddings. They are a commodity to be marketed and sold. The public are dupes to the pressure from the wedding industry. Mead tracks different wedding traditions: registry, diamond ring, white dress, etc back to their roots as well as interviewing people in that particular industry to expose the motivations behind it and what makes it work. I've read other books in this genre: Flower Confidential tracks the flower industry, anything by Mark Kurlansky, and the one thing that makes those books enjoyable is their love or appreciation of the product. Mead's disdainful tone bleeds through on nearly every page. The only chapter in which she is kind is on photography, perhaps she was charmed by the ex-hippie couple photographers. Rather than the humorous yet insightful book this could have been, it comes off as a edict against the wedding industry and everyone who buys into it. Mead's description of her own wedding only confirms this. She was married at the courthouse wearing a simple non-wedding dress and had a party in her backyard with friends. Good for her! The American wedding should be anything that the couple wants it to be. Elopement, small and simple, huge and gaudy, goofy, romantic, anything goes. Mead could have celebrated this part of American culture, but instead she chose to damn it. There was some interesting info in the book but it was overwhelmed by Mead's derision.
Wedding Culture in the Age of Bridezilla June 18, 2007
40 out of 43 found this review helpful
As we stagger into the third millennium, nothing is what it once was. That goes double for weddings. Once, weddings were a celebration of the transition of young people from parental control to their own control under the watchful eye of a beneficent Deity. Now, with the loosening of parental control, with the rise of cohabitation, the decline in church attendance, with the separation of sex and baby-making, and with the rise of a self-oriented consumer culture, the stage has been set for massive change in the way couples view marriage and the ceremony that kicks it off. Actually, the stage is far past set: we are well into Act II.
Author Rebecca Mead could have taken a number of approaches to this new culture. She could have been censorious about its narcissism, or applauded its liberation from its ancient anchors. Instead, she adopts a somewhat bemused, slightly aghast tone that allows her subjects to speak for themselves. And speak they do! Mead's main focus is the wedding industry, which is at an enormously-profitable dream machine. She obtained her information from a close reading of bridal journals, interviews with the industry's visionaries, attending trade shows and visiting sites from Wisconsin to Las Vegas to Aruba to China. What she sees is either refreshingly or depressingly the same all over. Brides (and an increasing number of men) are being sold on the idea that they must stage a dream wedding with all the "traditional" touches that expresses their personal sense of style. And the more money spent the better. Mead makes it clear however, that many of the features considered traditional are not all that old. Only since the 1920s, for instance, have the majority of American brides been married in white silk gowns. Some touches are plain obsessive, like the need to match the attendant's vests to the napkins. Mead calls these faux-ancient touches "traditionalesque"-- shallow imitations of tradition sold by people who have interests at heart other than launching couples into married bliss.
Mead takes us behind the scenes of the wedding industry and unveils the techniques that bridal planners and others use to keep their customers buying, buying, and buying. We meet low-paid Chinese workers laboring for pennies per gown in enormous factory settings. We meet the faux-ordained who tailor their services to their customers' desire for a churchy setting with but a veneer of religiosity. We meet the good people of Disney, that most profit-generating dream machine, who evolved from providing a few shots of the couple with Mickey and Minnie, to providing the entire princess package that includes a rented Cinderella coach ($2500 for a half-hour) with footmen and horses for brides who want to identify with their favorite character. We meet photographers whose repertoire of "iconic" not-so-candid shots varies little from wedding to wedding and videographers who slioce and dice their product into finely-edited packages that the couple must purchase separately and at great cost.
Mead often seems appalled by the crassness, venality and self-indulgence of American weddings, and only seldom finds a group that seems to understand that after a wedding comes marriage, which is more than the opportunity to watch wedding videos. She rhapsodizes over a British couple in Las Vegas, whose entire wedding party (including their parents and children) attended a ceremony in full Elvis regalia. For all the pop silliness of their choice, they seemed to understand the larger ramifications of their life together as a family, and Mead was touched.
Mead's writing is as elegant and dainty as the filigree on a lace doily. Sentence like this often appear, like pearls on a beaded white glove: "After a few hours, I was ovecome by a condition know among retailers as "white blindness," a reeling, dumbfounded state in which it becomes impossible to distinguish between an Empire-waisted gown with alencon lace appliques and a bias-cut spaghetti strap shift with crystal detail, and in the exhausted grip of which I wanted only to lie down and be quietly smothered by the fluffy weight of it all, like Scott of the Antarctic." You have to admire a writer who can deliver an image like that and link it naughtily to a nearly-obscure historical simile.
Put all of this together and you get a well-written, fascinating and eye-opening look at one of America's most revered yet most abused traditions. After reading this book, one may indeed wonder whether the institution of marriage would be better off without the industry devoted to its initiation.
Nearly perfect and hilarious June 1, 2007
24 out of 24 found this review helpful
I think some of the reviewers are missing the point. Mead's book is not an instruction manual in helping brides avoid manipulation. It is a sociological examination of how we choose to celebrate marriage and what this says about American culture. I mean the book wasn't shelved in the wedding section at the book store where I purchased it. It was shelved under socoiology.
"One Perfect Day" offers fascinating insight into how the significance of the ceremony has increased as the differences between pre-married life and married life has decreased for many couples.
While looking at this cultural shift, it explores the role of the industry that has sprung up to maintain it. None of the vendors and industry representatives come off looking like bad people. But they are business people and businesses exist to make profit.
I would, however, have liked to see more about the role that parents play in pushing their daughters into the role of bridezilla. In my experience, both parents are usually the primary drivers behind the more, more, more philosophy of wedding planning -- and often push girls who wanted to have a simple wedding into an elaborate affair. I would have especially liked to read an analysis of parental interactions with the bridal industry.
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