It is now a fully-fledged media brand, occupying an important space in the alternative wedding media sector yet managing to have crossover appeal to users interested only in its planning content. Since its origin in Citation2009 as Keene’s personal wedding blog, though, APW has transformed. It has echoes of the political character that defines APW, which identifies itself as intersectional feminist media and contains extensive meditations on the politics of equity and inclusion in the wedding industry. The series takes seriously the ways that clothing emplaces people in the social, while acknowledging that getting dressed functions as a theatre for personal desires. It starts from the recognition of the intimate relationship between body and clothing and acknowledges how the performative dimensions of a wedding intensify these ties.
In a culture in which women are expected to heavily invest in their ‘bridal’ appearance and yet excoriated for doing so, Keene charts a divergent path. It mattered to me more than I would have ever expected’ ( Citation2009).
What I wore on my body really mattered to me. I would go so far to say that at some points it was painful. In a series of posts on her personal wedding blog, A Practical Wedding ( APW), Meg Keene – now the Executive Editor of the popular, nominally feminist wedding blog that APW became – expresses the significance of wedding attire: ‘Looking for a wedding dress was hard for me. This article asks: what is at stake in the blog’s excision of fashion from politics? What insights does this cleavage between apparel and the feminist political scene offer for scholars of feminism’s digital ecosystem? While these posts gesture towards inclusivity and resistance, by harnessing these messages to commodity feminism and neoliberal concepts of self-perfection, these posts ultimately reinforce the heteropatriarchal messages in the industry that APW is ostensibly trying to resist. While many of its posts critique the ‘wedding industrial complex’ and provide meaningful spaces for queer and feminist people to discuss and plan their weddings, the posts relating to fashion and dress are largely emptied of feminist politics. So much is evident in nominally feminist wedding website A Practical Wedding, which provides an alternative media space for people who are marginalized by or politically opposed to the politics and commercial logics of the mainstream wedding industry.
Yet its changemaking potential is susceptible to co-optation by neoliberal discourses that harness politics with a commodified, perfectible individuality that superficially counteracts hegemony even as it subtly reinforces it. Fashion as a cultural industry, with its interface between self and social, is laden with potential for interventions in systems of power.
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