Bridecore

On Halloween last year, I went to a birthday party that was bride themed. My friend, who was hosting it, was going through a prolonged breakup and had decided to embrace tragic spooky romance. The results were less Miss Havisham as you might be imagining and more Corpse Bride. It was Halloween after all. In the backyard of a Brooklyn bar, a cohort of brides flitted around. At the bar, a few men asked me what I was dressed as and I told them I was a bride who had murdered her husband because I had just gotten back from a work trip and hadn’t really planned an outfit. They all seemed horrified and impressed even though it was Halloween. You’re crazy, they kept saying, the way you might say, you’re a sick little freak.

Aesthetically, my friend was not alone. Nylon remarked that everyone dressed like “a cool bride” at the 2024 Golden Globe Awards. Among a series of white or pastel gowns, decorated with roses and other pastiche, Hunter Schafer stood out in an off white Prada dress that was drapey and iridescent, almost wet. She was dressed the way a Greek statue might dress if it was transported forward into the 21st century and forced to get married in a church. On the cover of Interview magazine last spring, Lana Del Rey posed in a lacy wedding dress, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. In an accompanying photoshoot, she sits on the hood of a car, a discarded bouquet behind her, wearing a white minidress and veil, a beer can in her hand. Anok Yai wore an Oliver Theyskens dress that was all patchwork lace and netting to a Vanity Fair party in 2022, an old school DIY wedding dress. In Simone Rocha’s Fall/Winter 2022 collection, she debuted a tea length organza white dress that buttons all the way down the neck Edwardian style before opening out into a large heart-shaped cutout. The dress also comes in black, emphasizing its goth romance style. 

These are not your average brides. If anything characterizes “bridecore” as a wave, it is sleaze and a little bit of horror. In September 2023, Julia Fox attended a fashion show in bridal attire, a short white tulle dress and a cascading veil that falls all the way to the ground and ends in a pillowy ruffled hem. She drew on similar inspiration earlier this year, attending a Sotheby’s event in a dramatically ruffled short veil, an extremely cropped white satin turtleneck and a clingy white skirt that somehow only went up to her mid thighs. In between, she wore a tiny little thong bikini bottom. It was, to put it bluntly, the outfit that one of those mermaids in fairy tales who get captured by sailors might have worn to her wedding. Wedding as horror plot, Wedding as slashed up suggestion, an indication maybe about the state of marriage.

In popular archetypes of the bride, she morphs between an innocent, virginal, trusting girl, liable to be taken advantage of or abused, and predatory, domineering, hungry, the sexually accomplished woman who can bamboozle a man, the “bridezilla,” the woman in drag, hiding, who will slowly reveal herself as a monster, an anthropomorphized animal, a shrew, something entirely unfeminine. Archetypes, in other words, of women, but sharpened to a breaking point. In Bluebeard’s Castle, Anna Biller’s recent reimagining of the classic story that’s somewhere between a modern-day Rebecca and an elevated spoof on 50 Shades of Grey, the heroine wears a veil to her wedding that trails 20 feet behind her. Her brain is overstuffed with 19th century novels, fairy tales, romances. Her sociopathic, wealthy husband calls her “princess” because “according to him she was a spoiled princess and “little girl” because “he said she was still a sweet innocent Lolita in bed despite all he’d taught her.” It’s all downhill from there. In Melancholia by Lars Von Trier, Kirsten Dunst experiences a manic episode during her wedding and spends most of the film trailing her heavy white gown across the dirty grass, alienating her husband, scaring her guests, having sex, ultimately, with someone else on her wedding night. 

What is going on with marriage? In recent years, a spate of prominent economic studies, think pieces, psychological graphs, pundit books, and so on have propped up the dwindling idea that everyone would be happier if they got married. “The contemporary marriage fervor,” writes Rebecca Traister, in an essay for New York Magazine, “emerges from a 50-year shift that, for the first time in American history, has resulted in a narrow majority of middle-aged adults living unmarried.” For American conservatives, seeking a reversal to feminist gains, traditional marriage is an obvious solution. For liberal economists, think tanks, and politicians, marriage also represents stability to the social order. Claims that married people are happier and wealthier and more stable, that their children have better outcomes, feel like persuasive social arguments. Olga Khazan investigates some of these arguments in a 2023 Atlantic piece titled “Take a Wife…Please!”, where she questions assumed causation and correlation. Is it that marriage makes people happier or that happier people tend to get married?

It might be neither. It is not entirely true, as Traister claims, that single people can still live fully fulfilled lives. Women still earn an average of 18 cents less on the dollar than men do overall and many jobs that skew heavily female tend to be relatively poorly paid, including prestige jobs such as book publishing, but also including child care and elder care, cleaning, garment making, retail and other kinds of service work. Cosmetology, a field almost entirely made up of women, and often of immigrant women, has a flourishing system of predatory for-profit degrees, freelance contract work that offers no benefits, wage theft and tip pooling, and other abusive and poorly regulated practices. According to the National Women’s Law Center, the lower paid the job is, the greater women’s overrepresentation in it. Although they make up less than half the workforce, “women make up close to seven in ten workers in jobs that typically pay less than $10 per hour.”

It is true that it is possible to live an entire life unmarried or single, as Traister argues, and to still be socially and professionally at ease. But short of marriage or long term partnership, living independently and achieving financial stability feels increasingly inaccessible. This is essentially the argument of a whole heap of other Atlantic articles, titled variously “A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About: Two-parent households should be a policy goal”, “The Awfulness of Elite Hypocrisy on Marriage”, or “Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad” (this one is a lil’ different but boils down to the same thing). Marriage, these writers argue, functions essentially as a shoring up of prosperity. Wealthy people get married and pass on their wealth, stability, and life prospects to their children. If marriage has such wonderful benefits, they ask, why keep it to ourselves? Surely it is less elitist to spread the wealth around, let everyone get in on the secret.

Monogamy, writes Engels in The Origin of the Family “was the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property.” Traditional marriage, which was based on a relationship of economic and sexual subjugation, never had anything to do with love, was in fact antithetical to it. The defense of marriage easily spans the mainstream US left/right divide because it is, similarly, largely an economic issue. Recent “ideological” studies show a drift to the left among women and a drift to the right among men, which has stirred up a moral panic among America’s pundit class, including the Washington Post’s editorial board, who warned that marriage may be facing an existential threat. Couples, they argue, must set their politics aside and come together for their own good, or at least for the good of society.

But marriage is a politic. It touches on the most intimate parts of ourselves, brings up both what is often considered “soft” identitarian issues such as sexual and domestic violence, the right to abortion care, the division of childcare and domestic labor, and “hard” economic problems like housing, healthcare, financial instability, and so on. Adam Serwer argues for The Atlantic (again!) that worsening marriage prospects and the widening ideological divide between men and women has to do partly with worsened economic conditions for men who are failing to stay competitive. If men’s economic conditions are improved, he suggests, perhaps through widespread blue collar labor organizing, they will make more attractive marriage partners and harbor less resentment towards women overall.

“The first condition for the liberation of the wife,” writes Engels, “is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.” The argument that bettered economic conditions for women make marriage less desirable for them is perhaps not the checkmate that many writers seem to think it is. Marriage never existed, after all, for the benefit of women. In The Gender of Capital, a new book by sociologists Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac, the writers make a persuasive (to my mind) claim that while families still function as an economic unit to maintain and transfer wealth, they do not individually enrich women. Instead, they uphold rigid class hierarchies, allowing for succession of wealth between generations, often to the disadvantage of women who divorce or otherwise stray from the system. The poorer the women, the worse the repercussions of this kind of legal framework.

Against this backdrop has emerged the violent fantasy of “trad” marriage, which has taken over my TikTok feed and seemingly everyone else’s. “The past that tradwives want to return to,” writes Gaby Del Valle in The Baffler, “an anachronistic pastiche of rugged pioneer individualism and midcentury familial plenty, never really existed.” One of the baseline arguments of tradwifery is precisely that marriage was created for the benefit of women and that it serves to protect them from the cruel and rabid landscape of casual dating, gaslighting fuckboys, abortions on demand, and getting old alone. It recruits young women to its cause with this kind of scaremongering. An appealing idea, after all. It’s mesmerizing to see very young, very beautiful women living in some kind of domestic bliss, wealthy without obvious labor (aside from their influencer labor, which is hidden in plain sight), their husbands seemingly devoted to them. From there, the trad movement reveals its winding agenda for total social control. “To the conspiracy-minded,” writes Gaby, “tradlife is the ultimate form of resistance to elite social control, the inverse of the pod-living, bug-eating world just around the corner.”

True liberation, Engels suggests almost wistfully, will allow for real monogamy from both parties (not just the woman), driven by love and mutual respect rather than coercion. But, he adds, it is impossible to tell what a future society will look like until we are truly unburdened by the debt of societal pressures. If he is writing from a distinctly old-fashioned perspective, one that prizes heterosexual coupling and child raising, he also seems aware of the limits of his own vision. There is a whole world of possible romantic paradigms, infinite possibilities for how the world could look if we were freer.

In The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein by Marguerite Duras, teenage Lol falls in love and gets engaged to a slightly older man who she meets playing tennis. They go dancing one night and an “upsettingly” beautiful woman appears. Lol’s fiancé leaves her and asks the other woman to dance, cleanly replacing her in an instant. Lol watches them dance the entire night, trancelike, imagining herself implicitly in the place of the other woman, unable to process the replacement as a loss, until they leave, when she has a nervous breakdown and collapses. She goes on to marry someone else and lives a staid domestic life. Eventually, she returns with her family to her hometown in South Tahla, Morocco, and sees one of her friends, Tatiana, having sex with her lover through an open window. She lies down in the rye field and watches them, experiencing vicarious nostalgia and vicarious pleasure, imagining herself capable, as Sylvia Plath said, of loving and being loved.

Lol’s total erasure is intimately linked to her womanhood. She literally disappears from one minute to the next. Her identification with the other women who seem to supplant her is a real awareness of her own disposability as well as a way of regaining control in psychoanalytic terms. Tatiana’s lover, who narrates the story, is obsessively fixated on Lol and treats Tatiana as a kind of consolation prize. Eventually, he and Lol form a connection but Lol orders him to keep seeing Tatiana which he does, self-abnegating to obey her. In Lacan’s analysis of the book, he links it to the structure of courtly love which set up the object of desire as an unattainable prize, a limerence or fantasy technique to maintain perpetual longing.

Avoidance, in other words, but also a form of idealization wrapped up in chastity and self-sacrifice. In Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, originally published in 1929 but recently reissued by McNally Editions, the young wife is abandoned by her dissolute husband when she confesses to having her own affair. They keep hooking up off and on over the years and every time he accuses her of having ruined women for him, destroyed his ideals. If she, the perfect consummate woman, has had sex with someone else, then no woman will ever be really deserving of his love.

There are three kinds of women, says one of the men the protagonist comes across, the kind who were meant to be passed around, the kind who were meant to marry nice men, and the kind who should have been married, but somehow gummed up their chances. What about modern women, the young divorcees of the novel retort. They work, they drink, they have fun, they are abandoned. Folded into the book, writes Alissa Bennett in a Paris Review essay on Ex Wife, are “the kind of hollow distractions relatable to any of us who have ever wanted to forget: she buys clothes she can’t afford; she gets facials and has her hair done; she listens to songs on repeat while wearily wondering why heartache always seems to bookend love.”