With fewer people getting married each year, the wedding industry has had to innovate
Stats SA registered 97,510 civil marriages in 2024, down from 150,852 a decade earlier. That’s a lot less in the way of “I do”.
When volumes are down, businesses must get their pricing up to survive. That means charging more for existing services, or selling new things. The wedding industry seems to be doing both.
What used to be a single day has turned into a whole season, with a proposal, a hen weekend and a two- or three-day wedding, each with its own suppliers.
If your proposal involved a quiet moment and a nervous question, then congratulations – you’re officially vintage. These days, there are proposal planners, not just wedding planners. There might even be a helicopter.
Or a crane.
Before we get to that, we need to start with the wedding itself. Most of what we call “tradition” is a lot younger than it looks.
Something old
For most of recorded history, marriage was a transaction. Families negotiated dowries and bride prices, land changed hands and alliances were sealed. Love, if it was present, was a nice bonus, but not a requirement.
Lobola, very much alive in South Africa, has its roots in this concept of two families talking terms around a table.
Although we may feel like we’ve associated white dresses with weddings since forever, that idea is not so ancient after all. For centuries a bride simply wore her best dress, in whatever colour it happened to be. If she was rich, she wore the family fortune. When Princess Charlotte married in 1816, her gown was made of silver lamé and reportedly cost about £10,000 (or around R28 million in today’s money).
Then along came Queen Victoria. In 1840 she married Prince Albert in plain white silk trimmed with English lace, with a wreath of orange blossom instead of a crown. The newspapers and women’s magazines talked about that dress for months. By 1849, the American magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book was declaring white the most fitting colour for a bride, as if it had always been that way.
A small tangent, if you’ll permit me: when Albert died in 1861, Victoria put on black and wore it exclusively for the remaining 40 years of her life. She didn’t invent the mourning dress (that was already an existing custom), but she wore it so long and so publicly that black now says “funeral” as firmly as white says “wedding” in the public subconscious.
One woman’s wardrobe choices gave us both!
The next big leap came with a TV crew. On 29 July 1981, a reported 750 million people watched Diana Spencer walk up the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral in a dress with a 7.5 metre train. The day reportedly cost $48 million. A whole generation watched it and absorbed a brand-new idea: a wedding is a thing you can broadcast.
Popping the question (with a production crew)
If the wedding is the main feature, then the proposal has become its trailer. And these days, the trailer has its own budget.
It wasn’t always a performance. Victorian etiquette manuals were firm on this point: a proposal was a private matter between two people, and the suitor’s first challenge was simply getting a moment alone, away from the chaperones and watchful mothers. One guide from 1875 warned that even announcing your engagement should involve “nothing in the shape of an advertisement”.
Oh, how times have changed.
Dodger Stadium installed the first stadium video board in 1980, and the scoreboard proposal wasn’t far behind. By 2019, Fenway Park in Boston was hosting 50 to 60 of them a season, at $350 a pop. Then came YouTube, the flash mob and the camera phone. By 2015, 45% of American grooms told wedding site The Knot that they had proposed in a public place, up from 34% just four years earlier.
And once a proposal could be watched by a million strangers, it had to be worth watching. Naturally, an industry popped up to help.
In London, Daisy Amodio started The Proposers in 2011 after helping her brother pop the question, charging 500 euros a time. Her typical client now spends about £2,500. Her priciest commission? £800,000, with a team of seven sent around the world to pull it off. Closer to home, Gold Reef City will sell you a R5,000 package: a hotel night, a picnic for two and a helicopter flight with a proposal banner.
The trouble with more moving parts is that there’s more to go wrong.
Will you marry me? (Mind the crane)
Take the man in Sheffield, England who, in August 2020, filled his flat with hundreds of tealights, balloons and a bottle of wine, then popped round the corner to fetch his girlfriend. They came back to find the flat on fire and three fire engines on the way. South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue reported, with some glee, that she still said yes, and that the crew was awaiting their wedding invitation.
Or the man in the Dutch town of IJsselstein who, in December 2014, hired a crane to lower him past his girlfriend’s bedroom window, where he planned to serenade her and then ask. The crane hadn’t been properly secured, and it toppled through the neighbours’ roof (the neighbour had been asleep in the room underneath and had fortunately gotten up just moments earlier). Then, when a second crane arrived to lift the first one off, the sling came loose, and the crane was dropped onto the house again, making the hole bigger.
She said yes.
With the police’s permission, the couple left for a weekend in Paris. Behind them, 32 homes were evacuated and three were declared unfit to live in. To their credit, the pair cut the trip short to come home and apologise, but the neighbours, the bride-to-be told a local broadcaster, weren’t quite ready to chat. As for what the repairs cost and who ended up paying, I went looking and couldn’t find a single report. Perhaps that’s a kindness.
Both couples got engaged despite their disastrous proposals. Hold on to that thought, because money doesn’t improve your odds. In November 2014, on the eve of China’s Singles’ Day, a programmer in Guangzhou bought 99 brand-new iPhone 6s at a reported cost of 500,000 yuan, or roughly two years of his salary. He arranged the boxes into a heart, gathered his friends around it, invited his girlfriend to step inside and proposed.
She said no.
Photographs of him standing dejected in the middle of his heart, flowers in hand, spread across Weibo, where commenters called the whole idea stupid. The one consolation, as the tech press pointed out, was that the phones were in such high demand that he could probably sell them on and get most of his money back. As for his pride… that’s not so easily regained.
And now, the main feature
So what does the actual wedding cost? Nobody keeps an official figure for South Africa. The numbers we have come from the people selling weddings, and the national averages they quote look almost reasonable: about R200,000 according to wedding platform Bridebook, or R150,000 to R350,000 for 100 guests according to The Wedding Directory.
If you’ve been anywhere near a Cape Town wedding lately, you’re probably laughing at those numbers. Price a Saturday in the Winelands and they stop making sense. According to prices compiled by wedding site Novia in August this year, the most exclusive venues in the Western Cape can easily cost hundreds of thousands of rands just for the venue. That’s before anyone has eaten, taken a photograph or stepped onto a dancefloor.
No wonder credit provider RCS publishes a guide to how much wedding credit a couple needs.
Witnesses: now on Instagram
There are still (relatively) affordable ways to get married. But for those with big budgets, the wedding industry stands ready to sell them a season of experiences for an audience that won’t even be in the room on the big day.
For most of history, a wedding needed witnesses, because a community had to know that these two people were now one household. Today the witnesses have become an audience, and most of that audience isn’t even in the room. The proposal is filmed, the hen weekend has a hashtag, and the big day is planned around how it will photograph.
