They were one of the world’s most famous couples, their future sealed when he renounced his throne for her and she renounced her husband for him. But so much disapproval surrounded the audacious affair between King Edward VIII of England and the American socialite Wallis Simpson that their eventual marriage, before a handful of guests in France in 1937, felt more like a perp walk than a wedding.
“It was a sad little service,” Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, a wedding guest known as “Baba Blackshirt” because of her reputed Nazi sympathies, wrote in her journal. “It could be nothing but pitiable and tragic to see a King of England of only six months ago, an idolized King, married under these circumstances.”
It seems quaint to remember the days when second weddings were typically quiet and modest affairs, especially after a bit of adultery. Perhaps there was a sense that everyone was allowed just one public spectacle-style wedding in a lifetime. Maybe it was considered indecorous to declare “til death do us part” once again, when death had clearly not parted you the first time you said it.
That’s why former monarchs fled to France and commoners had small, tasteful celebrations, perhaps at City Hall, the brides wearing outfits like “a gray suit and a pillbox hat,” as the high-end event planner Bryan Rafanelli described it in an interview.
In contrast, let us consider the 2025 version of a royal wedding: the forthcoming marriage in Venice between Jeff Bezos, the billionaire king of Amazon, and the ex-TV host and helicopter pilot Lauren Sánchez. Having entered public consciousness when their racy texts were leaked to the tabloids during their previous marriages, their relationship — buoyed and insulated by Mr. Bezos’ estimated $228 billion fortune — has always had the feel of an extended P.D.A. victory lap.
Depending on what you read, the wedding will cost $15 million, or $20 million. Or maybe it will be scaled back to under $10 million because of the couple’s supposed decision to be “less ‘Marie Antoinette’” after the Blue Origin spaceflight this spring featuring Ms. Sánchez and a group of her famous female friends. The 11-minute mission suffered from a bit of a P.R. problem when the women donned sexy space outfits, discussed their extraterrestrial makeup routines and, in the case of Katy Perry, declared the intention to “put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”
No matter what the eventual price tag is, the event will surely feature plenty of famous people, judging at least from the guest lists for Ms. Sánchez’s star-studded, professionally-photographed bachelorette party and the couple’s two equally starry engagement parties — figures like Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Salma Hayek Pinault, Robert Pattinson and, inevitably, Kim Kardashian.
They’re hardly the first couple to flaunt their post-divorce returns to the altar (or even the first this summer: Huma Abedin’s second wedding, to Alex Soros, was a splashy, star-studded occasion). Elizabeth Taylor was married eight times, twice to the same groom (Richard Burton) and wore a range of elaborate outfits in violation of the traditional sackcloth-and-ashes dress code for second brides. For her wedding to the future King Charles, which came after the breakdown of both their marriages when they cheated on their spouses, Camilla Parker-Bowles wore two showstopping gowns, one in cream and one in pale blue, and a pair of look-at-me hats.
Wedding planners say it is no longer unusual to go large for a second wedding — with multiple changes of clothes, famous chefs, social media managers, videographers, the works — especially when at least one member of the couple has reached a higher income bracket and is eager to flaunt it.
“The first wedding, you don’t know how to do a wedding,” David Tutera, a celebrity wedding planner and TV host, said. “Second weddings are more fun, they’re more fabulous, they’re more over the top.”
“The second-time groom has a lot more money than the first time, and the second-time bride is twice as smart,” said Colin Cowie, an event planner based in New York who orchestrated Jennifer Lopez’s spectacular (and doomed) wedding to Ben Affleck. “The second wife never wants what the first wife wants.”
Marcy Blum, a veteran New York-based wedding planner known for her boldface clients, said many second-time brides used their new weddings to fix what they hated about the old ones — often because their mothers made all the decisions the first time around. For instance, she said, “A lot of people say, ‘The food at my first wedding sucked.’”
“Second weddings are often more joyous than the first wedding,” said Ms. Blum, who knows what she’s talking about: She was recently married for the second time — to a man 20 years younger than she is. “People are now very articulate about finding the love of their lives,” she said. “You’re setting the tone for the rest of your lives together. What do you want to be different? What do you understand now that you did not understand the first time?”
On a personal note: Allow me to recommend a second wedding! I was remarried in 2021, after a (happily amicable) divorce from my first husband. I wore an ostentatious vintage red satin gown, despite being in my 50s, and tried not to fuss when the guests failed to eat much of the wedding cake, which looked beautiful but unexpectedly tasted kind of awful. The passage of time makes you realize that only one thing matters at a wedding: When it’s over, you get to leave with the person you love best. (Ideally, this is your new spouse.)
Of course, second weddings come with built-in hazards: checkered pasts, 11th-hour prenups, vengeful exes, the occasional Belichick-size age disparity. “Sometimes, the father’s having a third marriage and the new bride is younger than his youngest daughter,” Mr. Cowie said.
What’s the worst thing that can happen at a second wedding? It’s hard to top the time that Mr. Tutera learned, the night before an elaborate wedding he had planned, that the groom was not yet divorced from his first wife.
Chaos ensued as the key players struggled to figure out how to salvage a situation in which 200 guests believed they were about to attend a formal marriage ceremony between two single people at Gotham Hall, a fancy Manhattan venue. The bride’s father insisted that the ceremony, or at least a simulacrum of it, proceed. Mr. Tutera ended up hiring an older, distinguished-looking actor to perform a (fake) wedding service.
He described another “high-high-high-end wedding” — the groom’s third, the bride’s second — in which the unpredictable 50-something bride threw a fit at the last minute as she began to fear that she was once again poised to marry the wrong person.
“She turned to me and said: “Done! I’m done with this wedding,’” Mr. Tutera recalled. Angry at the arrival of some guests she disliked, he continued, the bride ripped up the place cards, yelling, “Let these people find their own damn seats.”
Maybe it was the sound of the hired musician, Billy Joel, playing the piano, or maybe it was the drinks Mr. Tutera gave her, but eventually, she calmed down — and the wedding went ahead.
“Second brides can be much ruder than first brides,” he said.
If Oscar Wilde was right when he (supposedly) said that “second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience,” then for Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sánchez, it’s also the triumph of being a billionaire — a celebration not just of love but also of all the ways to celebrate love with money. Who needs to dress down in a dowdy gray outfit when your fiancé has publicly expressed his adoration by giving you a massive diamond engagement ring, installing a busty sculpture that looks like you on his $500 million yacht, and sending you on a girls’ trip to space?
What then would Mr. Wilde, with his aphoristic mind, make of veterans of multiple marriages? Jennifer Lopez, for example, has been engaged at least six times and married (and divorced) four times.
“I am somewhat of an expert,” she once said. “Not so much on marriage but on weddings.”
Her most recent wedding was in 2022 to Mr. Affleck, an ex-boyfriend to whom she had been engaged 20 years earlier, before they broke it off and married and then divorced other people. (Do keep up.)
They celebrated with a big party and many Instagrammable photographs at Mr. Affleck’s house in Georgia. She wore a white Ralph Lauren gown that included ruffles made from some 1,000 cut-up handkerchiefs and more than 500 yards of fabric. Henceforth, she said, she would prefer to be legally known as “Mrs. Affleck.”
Alas, they split up two years later.
“If I’m going to be benevolent, I think she really is motivated by optimism over reality,” said Ms. Blum, who worked with Ms. Lopez when she was engaged (but not married) to the baseball star Alex Rodriguez.
“She, for whatever reason, is a real romantic.”
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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