The glossy magazine covers featuring
smiling brides adorned with flowers and lace are not a new phenomenon. The first
magazine devoted specifically to brides was Bride’s
Magazine, published for the first time in Autumn of 1934.[i] In
Decoding Women’s Magazines, Ellen
McCracken notes that corporations like Conde Nast, publisher of Bride’s Magazine, learned early on that
the wedding planning period was a lucrative time to advertise to female
consumers, while simultaneously instilling ‘a large array of pseudo-needs’ that
the magazine could also propose to meet. Beyond strategically capitalizing on
the spending powers of women during the pre-wedding stage, these magazines also
sold traditional views about gender and marriage. Studies of publications like Bride’s prove that – unsurprisingly –
they reinforced the popularly held societal views common at the time of
publication.[ii]
For example, an October/November issue from a 1983 Bride’s featured an article titled ‘Becoming a Wife’ that provided
advice to female readers on how to fulfill their new roles – advice that
clearly reflected dominant social norms.[iii]
Articles like these (even when not as explicit in their training aims) were
also accompanied by advertisements for various products that (directly or
indirectly) promised to help women fulfill their new wifely roles. Therefore,
these glossy magazines packed full of advertisements for designer gowns, luxury
jewels, and upscale honeymoon resorts are not as benign as they might appear at
a glance. As McCracken notes, these magazines were stealthily training women to
‘uphold the traditional status quo,’ while also teaching them to purchase
commodities that would further ensure they would fall in line with conservative
ideologies concerning gendered relationships.[iv]
Although
one would hope that more contemporary issues of Brides Magazine would have done away with this practice of
associating soon-to-be married women with conventional domestic roles,
unfortunately, this practice continues. For example, the October/November 2013
issue contains an ad for Cuisinart that depicts a future groom, on bent knee,
proposing to his would-be bride.
He
has painted ‘Will you marry me?’ on the wall, and his fiancé reacts as one might
expect: she is thrilled. The copy reads:
One
good proposal deserves another! Not that he’s popped the question, it’s time to
say ‘yes’ to the kitchen of your dreams. So, when filling out your registry,
pick something fast, that’s build to last, something hot, like a set of pots,
and something new that’s brewed just for you. Make the kitchen of your dreams a
reality with Cuisinart.[v]
This ad highlights at
least three issues: first, the sentence ‘Now that he’s popped the question,
it’s time to say ‘yes’ to the kitchen of your dreams’ places the romantic ideal
of the wedding on the same level as domesticity, implying that, for the woman,
the wedding and the domestic realm exist (or should exist) in tandem. Also, the
word ‘dream’ appears twice in the ad, further inculcating in women the notion
of living in a fairytale world once married. Finally, the singsong, rhyming
nature of the ad, along with the reference to the ‘something borrowed,
something blue,’ serve to both infantilize women and perpetuate the prospective
fairytale-like quality of the wedding that women are meant to embrace.
A
Macy’s ad in the same issue features a young man and his bride-to-be sitting on
a couch, surrounded by gift registry items such as home appliances and towels.
This ad, too,
glamorizes domesticity: the future bride is wearing a tiara, implying she is a
princess who has snagged her prince. At the same time, she is surrounded by
blenders, cake plates, dishes, pots, and towels, and the copy urges the couple
to ‘Register for Macy’s Dream Fund.’[vi]
In this ad, both the images and the text suggest a merging of the romantic with
the domestic. On the second page of this two-page ad is a full-sized image of
two vacuums (meant to represent the couple), along with flowers in a vase in
between the two vacuums. The words ‘I do’ are in the upper right-hand corner,
and the copy reads: ‘Make a clean sweep as you start your new life together.’[vii]
The ‘I do,’ placed strategically over the bright pink vacuum cleaner, along
with the pink flowers, work together to imply that she will say ‘I do’ to her
fiancé at the same time that she says ‘I do’ to domesticity. Essentially, the
message here is that a bride-to-be can be a princess, provided that she
combines this glamorous role with the soon-to-be domestic role of wife. This is
ironic, of course, considering that fairytale mythology would have us believe
that the prince is supposed to take the young woman away from a life of toil so
that she can become royalty. Finally, the juxtaposition of ‘dream fund’ with
‘the magic of Macy’s’ works as a method to remind the bride-to-be that her
wedding should combine the magic – found through marriage – with her childhood
dreams of becoming a bride.[viii]
Hence, similar to the Cuisinart ad, the Macy’s ad also reflects the cultural
training women received during girlhood, while reinforcing domestic stereotypes
that will be continually thrust upon them in the coming stages.
Another
noteworthy contemporary advertisement for cookware appeared in the Winter 2014
issue of Martha Stewart Weddings. The
ad for All-Clad shows a young bride-to-be holding a large frying pan in front
of her body, and the copy below her chin reads: ‘I fell for a rugged, real
looker who cleans up good. Now we’re together for life.’[ix]
The copy indicates that, along with falling for her future husband, the future
bride has also fallen for the cookware. That is, the perfect marriage for a
woman is one that unites her with a
man at the same time that it unites
her to her new world of household tasks. While the copy on the first page of
this two page ad stresses the rewards of cooking together with a spouse, both
the fact that the woman is holding the cookware and the copy, which states they
are ‘together for life,’ suggest that the domestic realm is exclusively her
domain. And even though the ad is intended to be humorous, it still works as
any ad from 50 years ago might work in that it reinforces stereotypical models
for women.
What
is significant about all three of the ads discussed here is that they use
direct address to communicate (supposedly veiled) directives: Cuisinart tells
the future bride to ‘Make the kitchen of your dreams a reality with Cuisinart.’; the Macy’s ad tells her to ‘make a clean sweep as you start your new life together’; and the All-Clad ad maintains that
‘Expressing your culinary side is
fulfilling while creating a recipe and also when enjoying the results at the
table.’ While this isn’t an uncommon
practice in advertising, it is interesting to note that this strategic use of second
person (‘you’) is also prevalent in the self-help genre.
Bridal magazines are not often considered as falling within the realm of the
self-help genre. However, this childlike rhetoric, rhyming tone, and use of
direct suggest they may as well. And most significantly, these three
advertisements highlight how being a bride is, indeed, a pivotal stage in a
woman’s life. For this brief period of time leading up to the wedding and
during the event, a woman has become the princess bride that society has told
her to she should long to be. But immediately afterward she must return to
reality, where she will receive still more instruction on how to fulfill her
now role as a wife (and potentially mother).
At first glance these bridal
magazines may seem like relatively harmless products that simply buy into the
capitalistic wedding culture. But, in
reality, the contents that fill their pages actually do some lasting cultural
training during a period that has been framed as the so-called climax of a
woman’s life – the moment when she finally gets to become a princess for a day;
the point at which she’s finally secured her supposed “happily ever after.”
These magazines don’t train women on how to act for just their special day (or
the Bridezilla-influenced lead up to it), but rather they train them on how
they’re supposed to act in the days, years, and decades that follow it.
[i]
The title of the magazine when it was originally published was Bride’s; later, it was titled Brides.
[ii]
McCracken, Ellen. Decoding Women’s
Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Ms. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993, pg.
268.
[iii]
McCracken, Ellen. Decoding Women’s
Magazines, pg. 269.
[iv]
McCracken, Ellen. Decoding Women’s
Magazines, 269-70.
[v]
Cuisinart. Advertisement. Brides Magazine.
Oct/Nov. 2013, pg. 160-61.
[vi]
Macy’s. Advertisement. Brides Magazine.
Oct/Nov. 2013, pg. 54.
[vii]
Macy’s. Advertisement. Brides Magazine.
Oct/Nov. 2013, pg. 55.
[viii]
Macy’s. Advertisement. Brides Magazine.
Oct/Nov. 2013, pg. 54-5.
[ix]
All-Clad. Advertisement. Martha Stewart Weddings. Winter 2014,
pg. 137.
