For her Sept. 4 wedding, Jade Cabrera-Madden wanted a vintage photo booth that would produce analog photo strips for guests to take home as keepsakes. But the cost was beyond her budget.
Cabrera-Madden, 27, a vice president at JPMorganChase, started looking into other ways to make her wedding to Patrick Madden, also 27, feel personal.
In June, she came across Kornelija Newcomer, the founder of Korn Upcycled, on social media. Newcomer reworks thrifted clothes into new designs and sells her creations at the Low Tide Market, an artisan market in San Diego, where the couple lives.
“I was like, We have to go to this market, I need to meet this woman,” said Cabrera-Madden, who ended up buying several pieces there. An avid thrifter herself, Cabrera-Madden was introduced to secondhand shopping by her mother and loved the idea of breathing new life into unwanted or damaged clothing.
Soon after, she saw another post from Newcomer, who was looking to do more events. Cabrera-Madden reached out with an idea: She would scour thrift stores for apparel her wedding guests might like, and Newcomer would then upcycle the pieces to each guest’s preference during her wedding.
“It was awesome to find a way to not only find a sustainable vendor,” she said, and give her guests “something that they’re going to use far beyond that day.”
Cabrera-Madden and her husband are part of a growing group of couples who are incorporating thrifted elements into their special day. Search “thrifted wedding” on TikTok and you can scroll through pages of content.
According to an analysis published by Event Industry News, interest in sustainable weddings is growing. Google searches for “eco-friendly wedding venue” have increased 200 percent from April 2025 to March 2026 and are up 50 percent year over year, while “zero waste wedding ideas” emerged as a new search term on Google.
Shanakay Gillespie, 26, a hairstylist and cosmetologist in Raleigh, N.C., who is marrying James Midkiff, 27, in March 2027, is turning to thrifting to ensure her wedding fits her aesthetic, which she describes as “dark academia.”
“I didn’t want everything to look like it came from the same wedding décor aisle. I wanted pieces that have actually already lived their life,” she said. “I wanted things that already had character and history.”
So far, she has thrifted candlesticks, candelabras and old books she plans to use in place of flowers for her centerpieces. She also found a steel-framed mirror, which she painted gold and featured in her save -the-date video. For wedding signage, she used a Cricut cutting machine purchased secondhand on Facebook Marketplace to add text over artwork in an ornate gold frame she found at a thrift store while traveling with her fiancé.
“Saving money honestly wasn’t the initial driving reason for me. It was making sure that the vision that I had came to life,” Gillespie said. “You could say it’s a little bit more cost effective, but that doesn’t account for the time you spend transforming all the items.”
The décor she is thrifting, she said, fits her aesthetic and will also fit nicely into her home once the wedding is over. “Every piece I’ve collected tells a story, and it feels like us,” she said.
Online, thrifty weddings can spark debate. When Amy Dunk, 26, a bride in Bradford, England, who married May 23, uploaded a TikTok video of zero-waste bunting she and her friends made from fabric scraps with the text “This and never having a ‘shein wedding haul’” over it, more than 2,000 comments poured in quickly.
“Let’s not shame people for having to spend less money on a wedding,” one read.
The video, which has been viewed 7.8 million times, struck a nerve. For Dunk, who runs her own company that hosts craft workshops and makes at-home crafting kits, it was unexpected. Her intention was to call out wedding overconsumption, not frugality.
“The idea that you can’t do a sustainable wedding affordable is wrong,” she said. “It’s just more time.”
Dunk started visiting shops 18 months before her wedding day. Though it was tempting to be influenced by what she saw on her social media feeds — “My algorithm learned quite quickly that I was getting married,” she said — it was important to her to resist buying the mass-produced personalized décor she saw.
Instead, she decided on “color and joy” for the wedding theme, the mismatched aesthetic of which lent itself well to thrifting. She, along with her fiancé, Matthew Dunk, 27, and their friends and family, collected mismatched vases and plates for the meal that guests took home as favors. Instead of boutonnieres, Matthew and his groomsmen wore thrifted brooches. They upcycled a secondhand room divider into a colorful wedding backdrop. A friend embroidered thrifted cloth napkins.
The collective effort, she said, made their wedding celebration feel much longer. “Everyone said, ‘Oh god, your wedding goes so fast,’ but for me, the wedding was kind of 16 months long.”
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