Unveiling the Latest Wedding Trends with AI
Brand Insights in 3 Sentences: Each season brings new wedding trends that can indicate societal, cultural, and economic shifts. The trends we identified convey various sentiments among people, including the willingness to splurge on lavish weddings and destination ones. However, other couples are hosting more eco-friendly weddings and integrating their cultural customs and values into their celebrations.
Wedding season is well and truly underway, and while long, cherished traditions are still upheld, new trends emerge every year that couples choose to incorporate into their nuptials. Fuelled by social media, many of these trends can trace their roots to fashion, interior design, and pop culture movements. However, it also serves as a commentary on society and shifts in cultural currents.
From multi-day celebrations to traditional garments, we use our AI-powered tool Sphere to analyze over 1200 wedding-related Instagram posts and identify some subcultures representing the top wedding trends for 2023 and 2024 couples and their possible motivations.
Fairy Tale
Our favorite childhood fairy tales have often inspired many couples’ “happily ever afters,” With nostalgia also being a running theme in recent years, people are going all out to live out their fantasies in 2023. They rent real-life castles, incorporate extravagant decor and lush flower arrangements, and dress up in Disney Princess-like ball gowns and headpieces.
Despite talks of a looming recession, grand weddings are back in a big way. It’s reported that the median age of couples getting married in 2022 is 28 and 30 for women and men, respectively, in both heterosexual and same-sex marriages, which is much older than what it was in the past. As a result, many of them are more established in their careers and have an elevated budget, which they are more than willing to spend on making their childhood dreams come true.
Shabby Chic
The shabby chic aesthetic indicates the larger trend of people opting to have more sustainable weddings. Weddings can be extremely wasteful, and couples today are looking for creative ways to reduce their environmental impact. The shabby chic wedding aesthetic uses distressed, worn-out vintage pieces, and mismatched items, making it perfect for the eco-conscious couple.
Instead of buying brand new, couples are thrifting their decor items and wedding outfits, DIY-ing their furniture and decorations for an undone but personal touch, and using natural light by holding their receptions out in nature or farms.
Romantic Italian
With people feeling constrained by travel restrictions over recent years, people have been “revenge traveling,” and wanderlust couples are taking their loved ones along for the ride. 2023 has seen a rise in interest in destination weddings and a desire to create unforgettable experiences for their guests. Destination weddings tend to mean that a smaller guestlist of mostly close friends and family are able to attend, so they’ve become a more personal and intimate occasion, which many couples prefer.
There’s also a greater focus on other activities outside the usual wedding celebration and ceremony, like city tours or games, with couples looking to spend as much time with their loved ones and create as many experiences as possible.
Italy, in particular, has become the ultimate wedding destination for couples with its beautiful, diverse landscapes, delicious food, and dreamy aesthetic. Couples from all over the world are choosing to host their weddings there, with search interest for ‘Italy wedding packages’ and ‘Italy wedding venues’ growing at 80% and 48% respectively over the past 3 years. Others are incorporating the distinct ‘Romantic Italian’ aesthetic into their weddings. Some ideas include hosting their weddings at vineyards and by the sea, taking inspiration from the Italian countryside and coast, and adding common Italian fruits into their decor, like lemons and grapes.
Hanfu Movement
The Hanfu Movement, also known as the Hanfu Revival Movement, is a cultural movement led by Chinese youths to revive traditional Han Chinese fashion. The clothing style declined for thousands of years before being revitalized in the early 2000s by people wanting to embrace and express their cultural identity. Special occasions like Chinese New Year and weddings have inevitably since become some of the most popular events where they showcase their clothing and include traditional customs. While most couples of Chinese descent choose to wear both Han clothing and customary Western wedding attire at their ceremonies, others are forgoing the usual white wedding dress entirely for just their traditional outfits.
This renewed desire to connect with one’s roots and preserve traditions is not held just by Chinese people alone. It appears that young couples worldwide are looking to increasingly include more of their culture’s clothing and rituals in their weddings, especially couples living out of their home country or in interracial marriages. As a result, dozens of brands are cropping up, offering modernized versions of traditional outfits and products to cater to them.
Follow our page for more such insights. Write to anurag.banerjee@quilt.ai to learn about AI-powered market research and the latest consumer trends.
