After sending one of his clients a quote for custom save-the-date cards, Jove Meyer, a wedding planner and designer based in New York City, received an unexpected response from the bride.
“She was like, ‘My friend made this digital save-the-date with A.I. in the car on the way to work,’” said Mr. Meyer, who has worked in the wedding industry since 2008.
Welcome to the Gen Z age of weddings. With their native digital fluency, pervasive connectivity via social media and comfort with artificial intelligence tools, members of this generation, born approximately between 1997 and 2012, are transforming the traditions, logistics and aesthetics of modern weddings.
“With previous generations, you got a planner, they presented the options and you picked,” Mr. Meyer said. “With these kids — and Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok — visual inspiration and aspiration are everywhere. They’re being smart with the resources they have and being creative with the technology and tools that are available, and it’s shaking up the industry.”
Last year, about one-third of newlyweds were Gen Z, according to the Knot, a wedding planning website.
Many Gen Z couples use social media as a core wedding-planning tool, scouring Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok and Reddit for ideas, advice and vendors. But these platforms are more than that: They’re a space for comparison with peers. They are also the primary place where couples and their guests share photos and videos, and where newlyweds put themselves on display for the consumption of others.
“I’m Gen Z, and we all grew up wanting to be YouTubers,” said Lauren Ladouceur, who started working as a wedding content creator after drawing online attention for live-posting photos and videos from her wedding in 2022. “Gen Z is media savvy, and they’re also the most curated generation that I’ve ever met. My millennial clients are very much like, If this is cringey, I don’t care. My Gen Z couples want it to look candid, but every piece of hair has been put in place perfectly.”
As a content creator with her own company, Plan With Laur, Ms. Ladouceur documents wedding days with behind-the-scenes photos and videos, creates shareable social media highlights and even manages couples’ Instagram accounts during their events.
Existing in a highly saturated attention economy means future brides and grooms are often searching for ways to stand out amid the noise.
Milana Ayvazova, a senior event designer at Revelry Event Designers in Los Angeles, said the company had worked on weddings where there were life-size topiaries in the shape of a bride and groom’s dogs; 100 feet of French-style storefronts for a welcome party; and a station where guests could decorate rancher hats to take home as favors.
Another popular approach is customization — of everything. This may include gift bags, water bottles, hats, linens, cocktail napkins, bathroom hand towels, makeup wipes, and even emergency kits with tampons. With enough willpower and funding, all of these can be made to match a theme.
“It’s this mentality of branding,” said Ceci Johnson, the owner of Ceci New York, a graphic design studio specializing in invitations and event branding. “It’s the first time debuting our personal brand to our closest friends and family.”
Where once there were simple monograms, there are now logos and even family crests, Ms. Johnson said.
“They want us to create one for them,” Ms. Johnson said. “When we’re designing it, they’re like, ‘I want to be a mermaid and my husband wants to be a dinosaur.’ Or, ‘Leo is my astrological sign, so I’ll be the lion.’”
Still, there is one area in which Gen Z trends indicate a reluctance to stand out: the bride’s dress.
“I used to have brides saying they don’t want white, asking for a blue feather dress,” said Kennedy Bingham, the founder of Gown Eyed Girl, a bridal styling and consulting company. “Right now, the majority are wanting 18th-century traditional. The Basque waist is really in right now, a drop waist shaped very similarly to old-school Marie Antoinette-style dresses.”
On her Instagram account, where she has more than 160,000 followers, people have been requesting that Ms. Bingham show more styles with longer sleeves and higher necklines.
Ms. Bingham speculated that this shift into conservatism and modesty could be linked in part to online bullying. She noted that even people with smaller Instagram followings could end up on the Explore page, where random people might see their photos.
“You could have 10,000 people saying your dress is ugly,” Ms. Bingham said. “I think that’s affected Gen Z. They’re not trying to dress for their eye or their family’s eye, but for the internet’s eye.”
Ms. Bingham believes that the requests for “timeless” or “classic” dresses reflect a desire for safety, with looks that have stood the test of time because they’re bland and modest enough to be palatable to a wide range of people.
When it comes to planning the wedding, Gen Z’s digital fluency can be empowering, equipping couples with detailed information that past generations never would have known about.
“Before the internet, people only attended one or two weddings here and there, and their parents told them what it had to be like because they had more experience,” Ms. Ayvazova said.
That has drastically changed.
“There are a lot of things people share on social media that you would never think about,” said Julia Liverton, 27, who owns a stationery design company called Ton O’ Liver Studio and was married last year. “People giving advice about, like, how you should make sure the groom’s shirt is a similar shade of white as your dress so one isn’t more yellow or something.”
Though the cost of weddings has gone up by about 18 percent in the past five years, members of Gen Z spend significantly less per wedding — $27,000 on average — than millennials, who clock in at $38,000, according to The Knot. Wedding planners have noticed that Gen Zers seem more particular about what they spend their money on and might have lower salaries because of their age.
“We used to be able to show two florists, and now I show 10 to 15 before they make a decision,” said Fallon Carter, who owns a wedding planning company in New York City. “There’s constant pushback on, Can we negotiate this lower? They go through every single expense line — how do we get it down from $15,000 to $12,000 for the flowers?”
Ms. Ayvazova noted one major downside to the endless information floating around online or being served up through A.I. chatbots.
“People come with these inspo images, ‘I want this and this,’ and it’s not a real rendering,” Ms. Ayvazova said. “It’s not to scale, you can’t get this height in your space, and where are you going to rig these panels from? We have to explain that it’s not realistic sometimes.”
All this online education also means that Gen Zers appear generally less likely to do something simply for the sake of tradition.
“There’s a willingness to keep what’s meaningful and ditch what’s not,” Ms. Johnson said. “If it doesn’t resonate, they’re like, ‘Why do we have to do it?’”
Before Emma McGee, 28, and Kieran Miller, 30, wed in February, they researched wedding traditions via ChatGPT and realized that most didn’t feel relevant to them.
Ms. McGee disliked the idea of being handed over from one man to another, of the white dress signifying virginity and of a proposal as something the man has to choose to do, rather than the couple deciding together.
“All of it seems outdated,” she said.
Ms. McGee and Mr. Miller decided to marry at the New York City Marriage Bureau and to host a fancy dinner in a penthouse suite at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn for 30 guests afterward. Ms. McGee wore a brown hooded dress from Saint Laurent, and Mr. Miller wore jeans and a denim jacket. At the dinner, they forewent a dress code.
Melinda Guess, a wedding officiant based in Atlanta, said many young couples saw the ceremony as an opportunity to express their individuality rather than adhere to religious dictates.
“I think it’s more acceptable now to adopt the lifestyle you want and live in your truth,” Ms. Guess said.
In particular, she has seen a shift in how young people approach “unity ceremonies,” which traditionally involve three candles, two lit by the couple’s parents and one lit by the couple using the other two.
“That’s where a lot of the Gen Zers are playing around,” Ms. Guess said. “We had one with a canvas that the couple painted. One couple who are science majors made a chemical explosion with baking soda.”
Even the neat, classically pretty, three-tier cake is falling out of style, Mr. Meyer said, pointing to elaborate, unusual cakes crafted by the likes of Aimee France, Bodega Cakes and Madeline Bach of Frosted Hag.
“These wacky, sculptural cakes are the antithesis of a wedding cake,” Mr. Meyer said. “They’re not about perfection, but about authenticity; not about performance, but about being who we are.”
The post How Gen Z Is Transforming the Wedding Industry appeared first on New York Times.
