I have a bit of a problem with wedding tackiness. Quite a big one, actually. Not because I think weddings should all be minimalist, expensive or tasteful according to some mysterious committee of people wearing linen. If you genuinely love something, have it. Inflatable flamingos, lasers, enormous neon signs, whatever. What bothers me is the stuff that gets added simply because weddings appear to have developed their own visual language and, at some point, nobody stopped to ask whether any of it was improving the room. A beautiful old barn suddenly acquires a starry synthetic backdrop. A country house gets a six-foot projection of the couple's initials. A perfectly pleasant dancefloor gains a widescreen television showing… well, I'm never entirely sure what it's showing.
This is the bit I find strange. Weddings often take place in genuinely lovely buildings, and then an extraordinary amount of effort goes into making them look more like weddings. Giant illuminated letters. Monograms. Love hearts in quantities normally associated with primary-school Valentine's cards. Scanning lasers. DJ booths that resemble the control deck of a small ferry. None of these things is inherently wrong, and there will always be weddings where they suit the couple perfectly. But I do sometimes look at a room that's been standing quite happily for 200 years and wonder whether what it really needed was the word LOVE in six-foot bulbs.
The same goes for the entertainment itself. I've never been especially drawn to the “LAAAAADIES AND GENTLEMEN” school of wedding MCing, partly because I don't think most guests need to be addressed as though they've just been selected to compete for a speedboat on daytime television. Nor do I feel a great urge to make the DJ setup dominate the room. My instinct is usually the opposite. If the venue has character, let it have character. Put the sound where it works, light the room sympathetically, keep the setup clean and then get out of the architecture's way. Sometimes the best design decision available is to resist the temptation to add another design decision.
I suppose that's the real point. Wedding planning creates a strange momentum where “could we add this?” quietly becomes “should we add this?” and eventually “are we supposed to have this?” Those are three very different questions. The industry is extremely good at selling additions because additions are, by definition, things that can be sold. Another feature. Another prop. Another wow moment. Another object whose principal purpose appears to be appearing in photographs. But more isn't automatically better. Sometimes it's just more. A room full of people you love, decent food, good drink and music that makes everyone want to stay can already be doing quite a lot of work.
The filter I tend to use is much simpler: does this actually make the wedding better? Does it improve the party? Does it look good enough that you'll still be pleased to see it in photographs ten years from now? If the answer is yes, brilliant. If the only argument for it is that lots of weddings seem to have one, I'd probably leave it alone. That's more or less what Cut the Clichés has always meant to me. Not being alternative for the sake of it, and certainly not telling couples what they're allowed to like. Just questioning the bits that have become automatic. Your wedding doesn't need to look like a wedding catalogue. It doesn't even particularly need to look like anyone else's wedding. It needs to look like you.
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