The figure of the bride is one of pop culture’s most potent images. She is Grace Kelly becoming a princess in high- necked lace; Priscilla Presley embodying the sixties in her babydoll dress and beehive; Princess Diana ascending to the rank of the most famous woman in the world in whips of taffeta. In Special Day, Leo Costelloe reimagines the interior and exterior world of the bride as a prism for understanding gendered expectations and ideals.

The bride is positioned as perpetually aspirational in popular imagination, updated to fit contemporary trends and reinforced by ideas of women conjuring up their perfect wedding day from girlhood. Even in fashion, an industry that relentlessly pursues representations of ‘now’ and ‘next’, the figure of the bride is still treated with reverence. A tradition that started in the 1940s, a bridal look continues to act as the finale of every couture show— often topped off with a bouquet and a veil or flanked by flower girls.

The couture bride’s gown usually makes its way onto the body of a real bride who wears couture. She might be a famous actress, an It girl or the great granddaughter of an oil man. Either way, her wedding is going to be on vogue.com. ‘The Bride Got Married In A Corset And Cut The Cake In A Floral Bikini.’ ‘The Bride Dressed As A “Texan Marie Antoinette” For Her Ranch Wedding.’ ‘This Fashion Designer Bride Wore Chanel’s Mary-Jane Flats With All Three Of Her Wedding Dresses.’

Sometimes a bride is so good at being a bride that it helps her become a symbol of something bigger yet still invariably tied to feminine identity. The late Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, publicist and wife of John F. Kennedy Jr., is venerated as a saint of simplicity, a distinction distilled by what she chose to wear the day she got married. Her slip-style wedding dress has its own Wikipedia page with a section dedicated to its influence. Bessette-Kennedy is remembered much the same way her wedding dress is— a woman so elegant and equipped with taste that for her less really was more.

The dress of Sofia Richie-Grainge, daughter of singer Lionel Richie, was similarly received following her 2023 wedding— though it’s likely that Bessette-Kennedy’s style was on her bridal moodboard (and that Richie-Grainge’s legacy will not be nearly as enduring). Richie-Grainge’s three custom Chanel gowns, along with the overall elegance of her wedding weekend and its stately location in the South of France, positioned her as a new rep of bridal sophistication. And while high-profile weddings are often kept under wraps or totally secret, like that of Bessette-Kennedy, Richie-Grainge brought the world right in, launching her TikTok page with a series of candid Get Ready With Me videos posted straight from the heart of her wedding week. As part of this rollout, she shared the details of her take on ‘something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue’— a bridal tradition that Costelloe recontextualises in a mixed media cutlery set by playfully placing emphasis on elements interwoven throughout the bridal trousseau.

If Bessette-Kennedy’s bridal look solidified her public image, Richie-Grainge emerged from her wedding not just a married woman, but a new one. Her “transformation” was analysed, with onlookers comparing Richie-Grainge’s old-money-quiet- luxury image as a bride to the look and lifestyle of her past— from the shade of blonde and clothes she wore to the partner that accompanied her. Her wedding day alchemized a brassy bleach job into a honey blonde chignon, influencercore into couture, and in the case of the man by her side, a frog into a prince, as a sleazy side character on reality TV became a doting Brit with deep pockets and pedigree.

But more often than not, a Cinderella-style romance is more a return to or a reaffirmation of roots than a true transformation. Sure, Richie-Grainge married into music royalty— her husband’s father is a major record label executive— but she was born into it first. Similarly, New York City socialite Tinsley Mortimer, whose unlucky-in-love story shaped her narrative on the Real Housewives of New York (and in the press), finally found love with a Georgia businessman, returning home to her native South to start married life.

Despite the large amount of screen time occupied by celebrity weddings, the figure of the bride is endangered today. Around the world, less people are getting married. And when they do, they’re cutting back. Courthouse weddings, once viewed as the unglamorous choice for those restricted by cost or circumstance, are on the rise. For every vogue. com bride, there’s tons of brides-to-be sharing money-saving tips online— from supermarket wedding cakes to killing the open bar and asking family members to work the reception. Of course, less of a thing around can make it more special to behold. That’s why it feels like there’s a little extra bated breath around the luxury hotel bathroom GRWMs, vogue.com brides, those who can still afford fairytale.

But this inaccessibility also means that the datedness or lack of formality that would’ve previously marked a wedding as pedestrian or lacking taste can now work as an embellishment rather than a stain. Lana Del Rey appeared on the March 2023 cover of Interview magazine dressed as this kind of bride— eyelet wedding dress and a veil, unlit cigarette dangling from glossed lips, blue eyeshadow and a vacant expression gazing through a parking lot. In another photo from the story, she sits on the hood of a car laughing over a paper-bagged beer, this time in a bridal mini dress. The cover proved to be a memorable image, igniting its own mini-mania for the symbol of the bride— this time by way of the Dollar Store rather than the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Girls dressed up like the cover for Halloween, tacking on veils and relaxing their faces into empty expressions structured by cigarettes for photos. A newlywed celebrating in a parking lot couldn’t be further away from a celebrity at the perfumed centre of a million-dollar ceremony, but our obsession with both proves that we still can’t get enough of the woman-made-bride.