Samm Blake’s career in wedding photography has been built partly on an ability to sense when trends in imagery are shifting.
For instance, a few years ago, when the 20-somethings of Generation Z started outnumbering the 30-and-up millennial couples she was shooting, Blake made a point of offering more informal pictures.
“Gen Zs reject anything that feels staged or performative,” said Blake, who is based in Brooklyn, of her experience. Millennials, who grew up in an era when online images were polished to perfection, were more interested in curation, she added. “Every generation lightly retaliates against the one that came before it.”
Less discussed is the balance she finds herself striking between the wishes of the marrying couple and their parents, many of whom are footing or helping to foot the bill.
“I feel like the mother is just as much my client as the bride,” said Blake, who is increasingly shooting classic pictures for the parents in addition to playful images for the couple.
Other vendors are also witnessing intergenerational tension.
“We’re in an era of, ‘who’s driving this?’” said Ariel Meadow Stallings, the founder of Offbeat Wed, a platform for wedding professionals. “There’s a real shift in terms of presumptions about who’s going to have control.”
Much of it, according to wedding professionals, is the uptick in digital natives walking down the aisle. Since the advent of social media, vendors say, the generations have become divided over what qualifies as a must-have.
Blake, the photographer in Brooklyn, noted that she’ll have “brides who really want to express themselves with fashion,” but their mothers will prefer to keep it “timeless.” Such brides will often tone it down for the ceremony, “then they go a bit crazy on the other outfits,” she said, with reception or after-party looks.
When baby boomer and Gen X parents were planning their own weddings, “things were a lot more chill,” said Emily Berg, a wedding planner in northeast Ohio, referring to the absence of social media. They may have watched a high-profile wedding on television, such as the 1981 wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, but they would not have expected to recreate it quite so literally. Now, she asserted, “couples are looking at things on the internet they think are accessible to them that their parents think aren’t accessible at all.”
The clash may, at times, be more values based. The expectations of Talia Regenstein, 29, a product manager in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, collided with those of her father, a baby boomer, when she announced her engagement in December. He was “anti-wedding,” she said.
“He thought it was ridiculous to spend a lot of money on a party.” Nevertheless, he and her mother (who themselves only married in 2020, and over Zoom) were going to help pay.
Regenstein’s father came around when she explained that the June 2027 wedding she and her fiancé are planning near Graeagle, Calif., is “not about showing off or flaunting,” she said. “It’s about celebrating love and bringing people together.”
Friends’ weddings, more than her occasional Pinterest and TikTok scrolls, have inspired her, she said. “Weddings in our generation have so many personal elements incorporated into every piece of every little thing,” Regenstein added. “I walk away feeling I know them better because of how much of themselves they put into it.”
Still, she and others her age have grown accustomed to the idea that, when it comes to weddings, the generation gap they’re likely to fall into may be hard to scrabble out of.
When planning a wedding, “everybody needs to expect that emotions and expectations are going to collide,” said Susan Newman, a social psychologist, parenting expert and author in New York City. That includes couples who feel their day will be a bust if their parents insist on doing the electric slide at the reception or decline to pay for a photo or confessional booth.
“Both sides should ask themselves, what’s the most important thing?” she said. “The wedding is a steppingstone into a new future and a new life. You don’t want to go into them argumentatively.”
The parents of Casey Madsen, 32, are kicking in for her January 2027 wedding in Manhattan. Madsen, who lives on the Upper West Side and is a junior coordinator at Cheersy, a platform that provides day-of wedding coordination services, has fielded her parents’ guest list and song requests.
The push and pull between older and younger generations has come into sharper focus for Madsen through her job. “Several of our vendors will say, ‘We’ll communicate with the couple only.’ They have that guideline in place because parents will try to join planning calls.”
Berg, the planner in Ohio, has yet to draw a line. “I’m doing a lot of communicating between couples and parents to make things less emotionally fraught,” she said. “I always tell couples, ‘feel free to blame me’” if they decide to nix a parental request.
“You have to live with your parents the rest of your life,” she said. “I don’t.”
