In TV soap terms, no season finale could top it. Four star footballers getting married at four of the grandest venues in England to four very tanned young women in very big dresses with very big hair. The flowers! The diamonds! The cars! The caviar! Well, actually, the fish and chips.

This was real life after all, not small-screen fantasy, though looking at the pictures of England captain John Terry’s wedding to Toni Poole at Blenheim Palace, complete with five-tier cream-rose-festooned cake and hydrangea forest, it was hard to tell the difference.

But that, perhaps, is the point. Increasingly, it seems, weddings have become primarily opportunities to star in a minor motion picture of your own life, complete with captive audience. Think of it as Reality Fairy Tale. After all, like everything from Big Brother to America’s Next Top Model, the celebrity wedding is getting more and more absurd. How else to explain the progress from Victoria and David Beckham and their thrones to Elizabeth Hurley’s ocean-spanning extravaganza, via Katie Price and her Cinderella carriage? Simon Cowell couldn’t invent it if he tried. Last weekend was simply the icing on the cake. Which prompts the question: what next?

The answer is physics. When you can’t go any bigger, you go smaller. Witness Rod Stewart’s incredibly restrained nuptials in Italy. He wore a white blazer and navy striped trousers, she wore a simple white satin dress and no one who wasn’t directly involved knew even where it was taking place. Guess who made the front page?

Pointedly, fashion seems to have sussed this out before the WAGS. Wandering through Alice Temperley’s new wedding boutique the other week, I was struck by how hard it was, in fact, to tell it was a wedding boutique. The lacy white bias-cut dresses hanging from the rails and walls looked just like the lacy dresses in the ready-to-wear store in the next room, complete with the kind of subtle black embroidery that lifts a bridal gown to a different dimension.

Personally, the older I get the more seduced I am by the possibilities of ready-to-wear versus the classic frou-frou. This is partly because an increasing number of ready-to-wear designers are getting into the bridal game. The lines between the categories, and what is available in each, are getting ever more blurry. There are just a lot more options than there were when I was 27. You know something’s going on when the hot rumour is that Lanvin’s Alber Elbaz, designer of the moment, is about to unveil some wedding dresses. I’d say at least once a season for the past few seasons I’ve seen a dress that made me want to get married again, just so I could wear it. This spring/summer, it’s the Marc Jacobs off-the-shoulder lace-and-tulle confection with a train (see main picture below). It would make the most fabulous entrance.

But the attraction of these other possible dresses is also to do with the value positioning of those who wear pouff versus those who don’t. Consider publicity-seeking Victoria Beckham with her enormous skirt versus ex-publicist Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in a satin slip dress. Or “actress” Liz H. in bling versus Oscar-winner Angelica Houston in a white shift and jacket.

I know which group I’d rather emulate – and where, frankly, I’d steer my daughters. Admittedly, at four-and-a-half and almost seven, they’re a little young for marriage, but it’s never too early for feminist indoctrination. Marriage is many things – a large chunk of them fabulous (some, of course, not so) – but what it patently is not is a fairy tale. There’s a reason why the stories of Cinderella and Snow White end just after the wedding.

And before you start scoffing about fiction versus fact, I have two words: Princess Diana. The other night at dinner, seated next to a big-brained economist, we got talking about wedding dresses, and he informed me that many years ago his wife had worn the shortest dress he’d ever seen to their wedding. They’re still married.

Why look to the stories of your past, why embrace tired sartorial symbolism, when you can use the opportunity to step glamorously into your future? A wedding is one of the great adventures of adulthood. Dress for the occasion.

vanessa.friedman@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/friedman