“Our job is to make the bride’s dreams come true.”
“I love my dress, it’s elegant, it’s sexy, it’s fun, it’s totally me.”
“Sometimes it’s harder to commit to the dress than commit to the man.”
Say Yes to the Dress is a television show shown onTLC that shows brides looking for the perfect wedding dress. The show takes place at a top wedding dress store, Kleinfeld Bridal in Manhattan. The brides make appointments to find their perfect dress, and meet with a bridal consultant. Then she tries on many dresses and to add to the drama, the bride usually brings lots of family members to give their many points of view. Hopefully, she finds the perfect dress and then we get to see a peek of the wedding and how happy she is.
This show takes shopping obsessions to a new level. Not only are we trained to want things all the time, now instead of going shopping, we can just watch other people shop. Watching the ritual of the American marriage can defiantly be fascinating. The brides are determined to find the Perfect Wedding Dress. They will pay any amount of money (at Kleinfeld Bridal, the cheapest dresses are 2,000 dollars), buy multiple dresses for their dream wedding, and even after they find their PWD, they will change their minds and start the hunt all over.
It is fascinating how much emphasis has been placed on the PWD. The brides see their wedding as an expression of their relationship with their fiancé, and of themselves. What they look like on the ‘most important day of their life’ is critical for them to feel happy, confident and beautiful-like a princess. Women must have the perfect body, perfect hair, perfect makeup, perfect jewelry, perfect ceremony, perfect reception, perfect honeymoon and, oh yeah, the perfect husband. With all this pressure, things are sure to go wrong. This is why there are so many wedding themed reality TV shows, the producers just have to film, and they will get a great show.
What’s also funny is despite how determined each woman is to have the PWD; most of the dresses are very similar to each other. Long, white, flowey, sequined-when you see a woman in a dress like this you know she is the bride. If you have a body that is hard to fit, or very specific, unusual look you want, getting this kind of special attention would make more sense, but most women are easy to fit, and want a wedding dress that looks like a wedding dress.
The most disturbing part of this show to me is the complete and blatant shift from saying yes to the marriage, to saying yes to the dress. The brides and brides’ family is completely focused on how the bride will look. They are not focused on if they will have a happy marriage, or even focused on how the groom will look. The bride’s physical presence is at the top of the totem pole in the mainstream American wedding, with the groom as both her accessory and her reason of being.
