{20th Anniversary}

This summer marks the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana's death. My book, The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride: For Better or Worse, How Princess Diana Rescued the Great White Wedding, is quoted in various worldwide commemorative publications honoring the princess.

For the next few months, I will share book excerpts that focus on her contributions to the world of weddings as well as the essence of inner and outer beauty; later I'll also share excerpts from my in-progress book, tentatively titled, From Princess to Goddess & the Rebirth of Love.

Enjoy the first excerpt below....

{excerpt from}
Chapter Two: “A World of Celebrity” 

“The first worldwide media spectacular…with all the pomp and circumstance at England’s matchless command,” declared journalist Susie Pearson when looking back in 1991 at Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding ten years before. “It was, perhaps, the defining event of the eighties.” The brilliant affair also brought ceremonial weddings back in style almost overnight, resurrecting the bridal industry from the social upheavals of the previous two decades. After this royal watershed event, getting married became fashionable again and the world was ready! It put a new era of fancy wedding hoopla into motion: elaborate designer gowns; a return of the status wedding celebration; staged over-the-top productions and “celebrity” weddings as media spectacles—sometimes coordinated by professional event planners who became bigger celebrities than many of their clients.

Almost everything about the 1980s became a symbol of excess, “a decade in which style so often trumped substance,” continued Pearson. The appeal of the Prince and Princess of Wales’ grand ceremony ignited Martha Stewart’s brand of attention-down-to-the-last-detail “decorative wedding”—her wedding book in 1987 launched an empire! What followed was the wedding imploded as a “consumer rite,” a trend that, explained scholar Vicki Howard in her book Brides, Inc., had begun in America at the middle of the twentieth century. ~

[excerpt from The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride: For Better or Worse, How Princess Diana Rescued the Great White Wedding...pages 13-14.]