As brides break free from tradition and wedding culture evolves, brides are more than ever celebrating alternative styles and multiple outfits to new ritualistic wedding days. Brides are buying an average of seven dresses in the lead up to their wedding days. Today, that trend has produced the most incredible surge in gown sales ever seen. Chiara Walsh, though, may be the poster child for this trend. She ended up spending almost $4,000 on 16 different gowns before her June nuptials. The average U.S. wedding now hovers close to $35,000—up about 84 percent since an average of $19,000 in 2020. This increase reveals an appetite among brides to spend big on their looks across various pre-wedding occasions.
Chiara and Brian’s wedding weekend was a magical celebration of love. That was just the start—we planned an ambitious four-day sequence of dinners, brunches, and an epic excursion to Disneyland! As she planned for these events, she experienced a huge stress to stand out. Now that was really exciting, but I’ll be honest, I felt like I had to have an innovative new approach for everything under the sun. If I had a photo already in it, I didn’t want to wear it a second time,” she explained. After all, every bride wants to make a statement on her wedding day. And so now, they’re going for all sorts of different aesthetics, in an expressionistic way that focuses on their individual styles.
Along those same lines, Domynique Johnson has spent her evenings looking for white dresses since getting engaged. With an impressive budget of nearly $18,000 for 15 unique white outfits, she embodies the modern bride’s desire for variety. “I felt an immense amount of pressure on what I needed to wear… This is my wedding, the moment I’ve been dreaming about,” Johnson remarked. Her determination to craft the right bridal wardrobe is a trend that’s getting more popular as brides continue to seek out uniqueness.
Our program assistant Hailey McLaughlin was quick to catch this vibrant trend. She dropped about $800 on looks across her four-day bachelorette getaway to Park City, Utah. “For the bachelorette, I felt like I needed to be the best-dressed person in the room,” she said. Brides are reacting against a backlash trend. Yet they’re stuck, not wanting to break bridal and event party rules but now feeling the pressure to meet these heightened expectations.
Beyond the classic white dress, more millennials and Gen Z brides are making the bridal wardrobe their own. Chiara Walsh showcased her ingenuity by ordering a $19 white powdered wig from Amazon. She showcased it to its fullest for a “Founding Fathers” theme night at her bachelorette party. These types of selections are a testament to the ways brides everywhere are bringing more joy, imagination—even silliness—into their pre-wedding celebrations of bachelorette beauty.
For the second-generation Indian American and U.S. She changed into 11 different outfits to pay homage to both her Indian heritage as well as Western culture. She picked out a $350 Reformation dress and a $700 Picchika lehenga. With them, they artistically mesh old and new improving upon the traditional. “Typically, in Indian weddings, the parents will pay for the whole thing, and they’ll save up their entire lives for this big, elaborate celebration,” she explained.
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are fueling the new popularity of multiple outfit changes. As a result, most modern brides are eager to debut their distinctive styles on social media where highlighted. As Julie Sabatino of The Stylish Bride explains, many brides don’t want to go down the aisle looking like all the other brides on Instagram. “They don’t want to look like every other bride on Instagram,” Sabatino stated, reflecting the desire for individuality that many brides feel in today’s digital age.
David’s Bridal saw the writing on the wall before anyone else with the introduction of a “Little White Dresses” page on its website in early 2021. These dresses are ideal for a variety of occasions leading up to the wedding day. Brides-to-be would have no problem finding ensembles made just for bridal showers or bachelorette parties.
The numbers don’t lie—brides are raising the bar. On average, they are now buying 12 looks to accommodate all the wedding related events, a large jump from only eight ensembles in 2021. This increasing demand for non-white wedding wear is more than a new trend, it is a cultural change in the way weddings are imagined and enjoyed.
Environmental justice advocate and policy speaker Domynique Johnson testified to Michigan after the fact. “[Most of the outfits] are, unfortunately, in my closet,” she said, hinting at the reality that many brides face after their big day.