| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition. By Vicki Howard. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 306 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-3945-4.)
Vicki Howard spent two years at the archives of the Smithsonian Institution and another two years at the Hagley Museum and Library researching how American businesses and advertisers helped create a more efficient, standardized, and affluent product: the lavish wedding. She traces the development of the industry in the United States from the 1920s through the 1990s in three key phases: the creation of a national market in the 1930s; the development of a mass, rather than elite, consumer base as part of postwar affluence; and the growth of a postmodern ironic and individualistic aesthetic, which coincides with the rise of Internet retailing since the mid-1990s. Howard omits certain obvious topics, such as the history of bridal photography and the honeymoon industry, because those topics have been covered in other recent books and articles.	1
The book begins in the early twentieth century, as elite cultural critics denounced the poor taste of the showy wedding, favoring instead modest home celebrations, produced with considerable effort by the bride's mother. Such moralists were largely silenced in the 1930s as spending became perceived as necessary to lift the economy out of the depression. Bridal magazines, which also began in that decade, helped meld separate, diverse, and often small businesses and services into a single industry.	. . .

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