"A vision of love and luxury": The commercialization of nineteenth-century American weddings

Abstract

This article traces the commercialization of weddings in the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period, jewelers and silverware manufacturers recognized the possibilities of the bridal trade. They began to offer special bridal goods and services; they addressed themselves specifically to bridal couples and to those in search of presents for them; and they sought to influence the practices surrounding fashionable weddings in order to expand demand. Fancy bridal gift giving was further justified by a new sentimental attachment to goods among the middle to upper classes, whose fetishistic rhetoric remains a feature of wedding advertising today. © 2004 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. All rights reserved