One Perfect Day

出版者:Penguin Press HC, The

作者:Rebecca Mead

页数:245

出版时间:2007-05-10

价格:USD 24.95

装帧:Hardcover

isbn号码:9781594200885

具体描述

The 160-billion dollar behemoth that is the American wedding industry and the psychology behind the expense, stress, and folly associated with the typical American wedding

Using the American wedding as a rosetta stone, in One Perfect Day writer Rebecca Mead poses a series of questions that cut to the heart of our national identity. Why, she asks, has the American wedding become an outlandishly extravagant, egregiously expensive, and overwhelmingly demanding production? What is the derivation of the nuptial imperative upon brides and grooms to observe tradition while at the same time using the wedding as a vehicle for expressing their personal style? What does an American wedding tell us about how Americans consume, relate, and live today? One Perfect Day masterfully mixes investigative journalism and social commentary to explore the workings of the wedding industry-an industry that claims to be worth $160 billion to the U.S. economy and which has every interest in ensuring that the American wedding business becomes ever more lavish and complex. Taking us inside the workings of the wedding industry-from the swelling ranks of professional wedding planners to department stores with their online wedding registries to the retailers and manufacturers of wedding gowns to the Walt Disney Company and its Fairytale Weddings program-Rebecca Mead skillfully holds the mirror up to the bride's deepest hopes and fears about her wedding day and dissects the myriad goods and services that will be required for her role within it.

Weddings are no longer a rite of passage, no longer a transition from childhood to adulthood, or an initiation into a sexual or domestic intimacy, nor necessarily a religious ritual. The result of this cultural shift is that the event itself has taken on an ever-increasing momentousness shaped as much by commerce and marketing as by religious observance or familial expectation. The American wedding gives expression to the values and preoccupations of our culture. For better or worse, the way we marry is who we are.

In researching One Perfect Day, Rebecca Mead goes deep behind the scenes of the $161 billion wedding industry to discover how the American wedding is manufactured. Targeting business conventions, trade shows, factories abroad, and more, Mead studies the data produced by the wedding industry, for the benefit of its advertisers, on the consuming patterns of brides and grooms; reads thousands of words in trade publications and industry websites to reveal how the industry thinks and talks about their clients when they are out of earshot-as "a drunken sailor"; "a slam dunk"; or more pointedly, "a marketer's dream." Mead reports from:

Behind the scenes at the Association of Bridal Consultants' "Business of Brides" conference: Wedding planners learn how to target the upcoming "Echo Boom" bridal market, estimated at 4,200,000 brides by 2018. ("It seems like the less money people have, the more they spend," says the association's director of corporate relations, page 36)

"Top Fashion" wedding-dress factory: Mead visits a factory in Xiamen, China, where migrant workers who live eight to a room in dormitories turn out 100,000 dresses a year. A skilled seamstress earns six dollars a day making dresses that sell for a national average of $1,025. (pages 98, 81)

* Disney World's Wedding Pavilion: Mead explores how Disney built up its now-mammoth wedding program in the 1990s to combat threats to its theme-park preeminence. ("Couples are highly brand-receptive in this stage of their lives...If you handle their wedding and honeymoon correctly you create cherished friends," says the co-founder of Disney Fairy Tale Weddings, page 71). Note: rental of Cinderella's Coach: $2500 per ceremony.

* Behind the bridal registry: Department stores see registries as a means of gaining access to young, impressionable consumers who are forming brand loyalties-what one industry report calls "Your New $100 Billion Customer: the Engaged Woman" (page 117)

* Las Vegas, Nevada: Site of a 122,000 weddings a year, where competition is so great that hand-billers stalk the courthouse steps and Britney Spears's swiftly-annulled nuptials are used as a marketing tool (page 170)

* The honeymoon and destination wedding industry in Aruba: This Caribbean island is so eager to capture its share of the American wedding market that it changed its marriage laws-now one out of every three weddings conducted in Aruba is for tourists. "I call it the 'new elopement," says one industry expert (page 200)

* The phenomenon of "vow renewal": Mead visits Sandals Royal Caribbean Hotel, in Montego Bay, Jamaica-a wedding factory, hosting between 5-10 ceremonies a day, of which 1 in 6 is a vow-renewal ceremony. Brides and grooms get to re-enact the "once in a lifetime" moment of marriage as often as their budget will allow (page 216)

* A class for would-be wedding planners: Attendees are taught to size up clients by making house calls-the fancier the bride's home, the bigger the budget-and to persuade brides to attend their "how to plan your own wedding" seminars ("She's going to come out of the course going, Oh, God, I don't want to do that. Just show her what it involves and she'll be scared to death," page 51)

* "Vows" magazine and other trade publications: Mead reveals how trade magazines urge retailers to squeeze more dollars out of each bride: "Just when a bride thinks she'll have to spend no more, it's your job to remind her that her bridal image looks incomplete"(page 83). The number of brides-about 2.3 million a year-cannot be increased by marketing efforts, and rates of marriage are on the decline, so each bride bears more of the burden of increasing industry profits.

* A seminar for wedding dress retailers in Las Vegas: Chip Eichelberger, a motivational speaker, offers advice on the pacing of a sale-"If you get them excited about the three-hundred-dollar dress it's hard to get them excited about the three-thousand-dollar dress"-and how to act upon "the 'Oh, Mommy,' moment," when a bride falls in love with a gown (page 78-79)

* Hebron Church, also known as "The Chapel on the Hill": A struggling rural Wisconsin church is forced by economic pressures to moonlight as a commercial wedding chapel (page 145), while the ranks of freelance wedding ministers-some with credentials acquired online-who will perform crowd-pleasing "spiritual" ceremonies replete with rituals invented for the camera begin to swell (page 130).

* Gatlinburg, Tennessee: The "honeymoon capital of the South," a Bible-belt mountain destination where there are annually 5 weddings per year-round-resident. The wedding-chapel business was founded in 1979 by the controversial Reverend Ed Taylor, a former Baptist minister. "I think it is dangerous, spiritually dangerous, to use the Lord in that manner-in order to gain business, and to use it as a marketing tool," says a rival chapel owner (page 162)

* Behind the scenes at the Wedding & Event Videographers Association International annual convention: Videographers are advised to double their prices ("I was blind to the fact that people want the best for their children," says one successful videographer), told how to incorporate comic shots (the "gift steal" and the "runaway groom"), and learn how to slice and dice raw footage into multiple video products to increase profits. The value of video is promoted as "preserving memories" that will otherwise be "lost." "You have to get [them] initially, before they spend $3000 on napkins" (page 185)

作者简介

Rebecca Mead has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1997. Before that, she was a contributing editor at New York magazine and a writer for the Sunday Times of London. She received her B.A. from Oxford University and her M.A. from N.Y.U.

用户评价

阅读体验中，最让我印象深刻的是作者对环境氛围的营造能力。这本书里的“地方感”是如此强烈，仿佛你不仅仅是在阅读文字，而是真的置身于那些街道、那些房间之中。光线的变化、空气中的味道、细微的声响，都被捕捉并转化为文字，构建出一个个鲜活的场景。例如，书中描绘某个雨夜的段落，那份潮湿、那份压抑，几乎透过纸页渗透出来，让人忍不住想要拉紧衣领。这种沉浸感，绝非简单的堆砌形容词就能达成，它需要作者对细节拥有近乎偏执的捕捉力。然而，这种极致的氛围营造在某些关键冲突点反而显得有些过于“饱和”了，以至于人物的情感爆发点似乎被周围的环境光环压制了，主角的情绪波动，在那一刻，本该如火山喷发，却被那无边无际的雨景温柔地吸收和稀释了。或许作者是故意的，试图表现外界环境对个体精神的压制，但这确实让我对角色更深层次的内心冲击力体验打了一点折扣。

这本书的语言风格是极其多变的，这使得阅读过程充满了新鲜感。时而，作者的文字如同冰冷的匕首，精准、克制，只用最少的词汇刻画出最尖锐的场景；时而，笔锋又变得极其抒情，色彩斑斓，充满了对逝去美好事物的挽歌。这种张弛有度的文风，让我的阅读节奏不断被调整，始终保持着警觉。令人称道的是，作者对口语化的处理也十分到位，人物的对话听起来真实可信，充满了生活气息，没有那种刻意雕琢的“文学腔”。如果一定要吹毛求疵，我认为在全书的尾声部分，作者似乎过于沉迷于对意象的反复强调，导致结尾的力量感略有分散。本可以一锤定音的收束，却因为对某些反复出现的象征符号的最后一次深情凝视，显得拖沓了一点点，削弱了本该有的那种震撼性的落幕感。但这只是瑕不掩瑜的小问题，总体而言，语言的驾驭能力毋庸置疑。

这本书的人物塑造层次感丰富，远非脸谱化的存在。我尤其欣赏作者处理人物复杂性时的那种游刃有余。没有绝对的好人或坏蛋，每个人都带着自己难以言说的灰色地带和那些只有自己才懂的逻辑。主角的行为逻辑，时常让人感到困惑，你会忍不住在心里反驳他的一些决定，但下一秒，作者又会通过一段内心的独白，让你瞬间理解并原谅了他的选择。这种在理解与不解之间反复拉扯的过程，极大地丰富了阅读的智力参与感。不过，有一个配角的命运安排，我感到非常遗憾，他的转变似乎来得有些仓促和突兀，像是为了服务于情节上的某种高潮而不得不进行的“功能性牺牲”，而不是自然演化出来的结果。如果作者能用三分之一的篇幅去铺垫他内心的矛盾，而不是集中在最后几章草草收尾，那么整部作品的情感重量会更加均衡和持久。

这本书的叙事节奏简直是教科书级别的，作者对时间线的把控精准得令人惊叹。故事伊始，那种缓慢渗透的悬念感，像一层薄雾，让你迫不及待地想知道雾气后究竟隐藏着什么。每一个场景的切换都经过深思熟虑，不是为了炫技，而是为了推动情节的内在逻辑。我尤其欣赏作者在描绘人物内心挣扎时所采用的细致笔触，那些微妙的犹豫、突然的顿悟，都处理得极其到位。你甚至能感觉到角色呼吸的频率在变化。不过，我认为在故事中段，有一个次要情节的展开略显冗长，虽然它最终服务于主线，但处理得可以更精炼一些，在那部分，我感觉稍微出戏，仿佛作者在刻意拉长篇幅来烘托气氛，略微牺牲了叙事的效率。总体来说，它的结构如同一个精密的钟表，每一个齿轮都咬合得恰到好处，展现了作者扎实的叙事功底。读完之后，那种意犹未尽的感觉，很大程度上源于对叙事技巧本身的赞叹，它让你重新审视“如何讲好一个故事”这个问题。

从主题深度来看，这本书抛出了许多引人深思的哲学命题，它不仅仅是一个关于某个特定事件的故事，更像是一面镜子，映照出我们在面对选择、面对失落时的人性底色。作者在对话中巧妙地植入了那些关于时间、记忆和救赎的探讨，它们不是说教，而是角色在真实困境中碰撞出的火花。我特别喜欢那些关于“错过”的探讨，那种宿命感被处理得既悲凉又不乏一丝希望的张力。但坦白说，某些理论性的探讨在故事进展到后半段时，变得有些过于抽象化了，仿佛从小说突然跳跃到了哲学论文的节选。虽然观点本身极具价值，但如果能更巧妙地将其融入到角色的具体行动和感官体验中，而不是以相对纯粹的理论形式呈现，读者的接受度会更高，故事的流畅性也不会受到影响。