The wedding-industrial complex wasn't invented by Instagram

I keep seeing this framing — that weddings are objectively more baroque now, that we've collectively lost our minds on centerpieces. But I wonder if we're confusing visibility with inflation. The elaborate wedding isn't new. What's new is that everyone documents it, and the documentation circulates. Go back to the 1950s society pages. Six-hour affairs, multiple costume changes, orchestras imported from out of state. The Vanderbilt weddings. The Kennedy wedding in 1953 — that was theater. The difference is those were largely invisible to anyone outside a specific social stratum. You read about them in the Times, maybe saw photos months later in Life Magazine. They happened, they were enormous, then they vanished into memory and a dusty album somewhere. Now every wedding gets the full production treatment and lives on the internet forever. So either: weddings actually did get significantly more elaborate across the middle class (plausible — disposable income, easier credit, Instagram aspiration), or we just see them now in a way we never did before, which makes them *seem* more elaborate. Or both. Actually, almost certainly both. What I don't think has changed is that people have always wanted to mark transitions with ceremony and excess. The scale and visibility are what shifted. The impulse is old.