The world had a ball mocking and harumphing over the Fellini-esque epic known as Jeff in Venice. But in fairness, any analysis of modern wedding stats would show that the Bezos-Sánchez nuptials were, proportionate to the couple’s liquidity, a bit on the stingy side.
Actually, it’s us non-money-bagses who are the true vulgarian show-offs, staging marry-thons quite out of sync with our means.
The cost of weddings has mushroomed during the past decade or two, largely because it’s now the norm to detain one’s guests for three days, even when the affianced (and guests) are of modest income.
There’s a case for saluting Bezos’s frugality; as one of the world’s richest people he could easily have entertained and incarcerated his guests for a whole week.
At least his entourage could afford all the travel and frockage required of them, and wouldn’t later be billed for the honeymoon, drinks and other sundries.
New data by the UK government-sponsored Money and Pensions Service puts the average cost of being a wedding guest, including travel, clothes and presents, at more than NZ$4500 per year.And often, the wedding and stag/hen do eats into guests’ own limited allocation of holiday time.
Accurate wedding-cost figures are elusive, most compiled by wedding businesses anxious to promote largesse. But in NZ dollar terms, mass-market wedding site The Knot’s average wedding cost calculations for 2023 (with average incomes for each country bracketed for comparison) are as follows: United States, $57,000 ($131,000), Britain $46,000 ($95,000), Spain $41,000 ($84,000) and France nearly $36,000 ($97,000). These may be underestimates. A survey by wedding planners Hitched put the average cost of a UK wedding at $52,700 in May, up from $45,000 in 2023.
The venerable British publication Country Life once campaigned against the big, fat wedding trend, believing it inconsiderate to guests. “Do show some restraint,” it pleaded in 2017, deploring multi-day events. It also deemed prolonged hen and stag dos “naff” and advised against even an après-wedding gathering on the grounds that surely family and friends would have seen plenty of one another (and the happy couple) already. It may as well have saved its ink; #OurSmallHumbleWedding is still not trending.
At least Bezos-Sánchez guests could economise on wardrobe outgoings for one of the Venetian events: a pyjama party. Lauren Sánchez certainly scooped the pool for most ostentatious hen party: a voyage into space.
Here on Earth, such rampages have become a cultural pinch point in Europe, aside from the expense. A number of cities, notably Prague and Amsterdam, now explicitly discourage stag/hen tourists.
Quite why such boisterous tourism emanates overwhelmingly from the British Isles is not clear, but it’s likely a combo of cheap air fares, lower foreign bar prices and climate.
Weddings are also a dispiriting intergenerational warzone, Boomers loving to humble-brag their “ladies a plate” knees-up memories in which nanas ran up the frocks, aunties did the flowers and the boat was really being pushed out if more than two rolls of pricey Kodak colour film were involved. Honeymoon travel was deferred for housing and babies.
For today’s couples, even a wedding budget of tens of thousands of dollars, euros or pounds would fall short of a deposit on so much as a bedsit – but it does buy some spoiling. Perhaps splashing out on one’s own personal Glastonbury is quite proportionate after all.
If only, like the Bezoses, we could all look forward to a new wedding tradition on that special day: a protest flotilla of inflatable crocodiles provided at no cost by indignant onlookers to remind us of the impact on the planet.
