and the ensuing easement of gathering restrictions, after more than a year of the coronavirus pandemic, are making for a wedding season of grand proportions.
This left newly engaged couples with hopes of walking down the aisle in 2021 to compete with the pandemic postponers for peak-wedding-season dates this year.
Zola, a wedding-planning and registry website, found in an internal survey that couples in 2021 are getting married much sooner after their engagement this year than they were in 2019, Emily Forrest, the director of communications at Zola, told me.
Jonathan Buckley, a 28-year-old technical account manager who lives in Los Angeles, was invited to five weddings this summer—and three of them are on consecutive weekends in June.
Couples who have postponed their wedding at The Wilburton, in Manchester Village, Vermont, about half are postponements from 2020, Tajlei Levis, one of the innkeepers, told me.
As postponements began butting up against new bookings for this summer, Babb, the photographer, hired four new freelancers to help him handle the workload of this season’s 70 weddings.
She received inquiries for June weddings only a month in advance, and told me that as capacity restrictions lifted in May, several couples called looking to bolster their guest list just days before their event.
The pandemic illuminated how weddings could be pared down—and indeed enjoyed despite their small size—but demand for the conventional trappings of the wedding industry, such as big receptions, DJs, and wedding planners, seems to have returned as soon as they became available again.
Stacey Lee, a florist and the owner of Paeonia Designs, is currently working with a handful of couples for the second time, creating arrangements for their large celebrations more than a year after their backyard ceremonies.
According to another Zola survey, the expenses are adding up for couples who had to reschedule or who are doing an extra ceremony, because they’ve had to print new invitations, say, or pay for a photographer to shoot an elopement last year and a reception this year.
Even if Lee, who is nonbinary, is having their busiest wedding season ever, they say they’re relishing the return to work.