Editor’s Note: This essay accompanies this week’s episode of the Showroom Theory Podcast, featuring Kennedy Bingham of Gown Eyed Girl. While the conversation explores bridal through Kennedy’s voice and lived experience, this piece widens the lens - examining authorship, aesthetics, and power in an industry shaped by visibility and constraint. The episode and this essay are meant to stand independently. Together they trace the same question from different angles: who gets to decide what bridal is, and who it’s for.
After a decade in this industry, I’ve come to know that there is a specific kind of panic that often materializes in bridal. It’s a tricky panic - one that seldom announces itself.
It hides under competence.Under preparation.Under the language of inspiration.
It looks, deceptively, like a woman who’s done her research. She arrives with screenshots of TikTok videos (many of them likely featuring Kennedy Bingham, creator and founder of Gown Eyed Girl - a digital platform and styling business with an audience of over 1.2 million followers), a meticulous fantasy spread of gowns she’s tried on (ranked by wearability), and a file of saved silhouettes pulled from recent runways.
The average bride now metabolizes thousands of wedding images before ever stepping into a fitting room. Pinterest reports that wedding-related searches even begin 12-18 months before engagement for many users. She knows the words. She knows the trends. She can tell you exactly what she doesn’t want.
And then, somewhere between the third fitting and the seventh mood board revision, something cracks. She realizes she doesn’t actually know what she likes.
Not because she is shallow or lacks taste.Not because she is incapable of deciding.
But because most brides don’t begin this process with desire.Instead, they begin with constraint.
Family expectations. Budgets. Timing. Cultural norms. Designer availability. Social media. Trend cycles. Geography - especially for those navigating what I’m now referring to as ‘bridal deserts.’ The pressure to look right, not just beautiful. The invisible audience in her head, for whom she has been rehearsing this day for years.
This is what we call choice. But it’s really something closer to negotiation.
And the real question a bride is trying to answer is rarely what dress do I like?It’s: who gets to author me in this moment?
Enter: the bridal stylist.
When “Cool” Became a Survival Strategy
Think pieces already exist in Refinery29, Brides, and The Cut about Kennedy’s unique approach to bridal. One of my favorites is titled “How a Gown Eyed Girl Got Married: The vision was weirder, weirder, weirder" because it succinctly captures her willingness to move against the grain in an industry enamored with setting and following trends.
Kennedy is one of the few bridal stylists whose platform grew not by selling fantasy, but by interrogating it. Her rise coincided with a moment when bridal content began shifting from inspiration toward commentary - and many people were unprepared for that transition. Unlike most viral bridal creators, she didn’t build her audience by positioning herself as aspirational. She built it by being legible, opinionated, and willing to articulate what the industry typically keeps private.
On a call between friends (and all of you) Kennedy voiced a quiet truth I’ve been circling for months: somewhere along the way, bridal became obsessed with being cool.
Not meaningful.Not intimate.Not reverent.
Cool.
Cool is a deceptively expensive goal because it requires an equal and opposite condition. If something is cool, something else must be uncool. If one bride is cool, someone else becomes the cautionary tale. The same logic applies to designers, vendors, stylists, and social media mavens.
It’s no longer countercultural.It’s no longer cultivated over time.It’s no longer punk.
Cool is algorithmic - pre-approved by platforms, optimized for legibility, and rewarded with visibility. It promises safety: you will not be mocked, you will not regret this, you will not look back on your wedding photo dump and cringe.
In an attention economy, cool isn’t about status. It’s about risk management, and this is why brides and designers chase it so desperately.
Not because they want to be admired, but because they are afraid of getting it wrong.
Afraid of being behind.Afraid of misreading the moment.Afraid of choosing something that won’t survive the archive.
Cool promises protection, but it quietly narrows the range of what’s socially permissible.
“The Cool Girl Monologue” from the book Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Grief No One Names
If you look hard enough at the bride’s thought process when choosing a gown, you’ll notice that under bridal indecision lies grief.
Grief for a time when intuition felt trustworthy, for rituals that once came with shared meaning, for a cultural map that used to exist, and for all of the other forks in the road you could have traveled - the other bride archetypes they could have embodied.
There’s no longer a “default” bride, once clad in the standard strapless gown. Every choice feels like a referendum on identity.
In earlier eras, weddings were governed by norms you could accept or reject: the traditional bride, the shabby-chic bride, the anti-bride. Today, there is no consensus to push against… only infinite options and no clear authority.
Unless you count Kennedy (which I unabashedly do).
Her authority doesn’t come from distance or abstraction. It comes from proximity: years spent in fitting rooms, mediating between brides and their mothers, budgets, bodies, relationships, and lots of expectations.
Brides aren’t overwhelmed because they have too many dresses to choose from.They’re overwhelmed because they’re being asked to self-author inside a system that punishes missteps.
The loss they’re grieving isn’t the dress.It’s the loss of shared understanding.
Authorship vs. Performance
I often describe weddings as the highest form of self-expression - a view Kennedy shares. But in practice, what many brides are actually doing is performance.
Performance asks: How will this be received?Authorship asks: Is this true?
Performance curates legibility.Authorship seeks coherence.
Performance manages an audience.Authorship listens to the soul.
This is why a bride can stand in a dress that fits perfectly and still feel wrong. The mirror reflects beauty, but not recognition. The body knows when it hasn’t played a role in decision-making.
And in bridal, whether from the bride or from the designer, performance is rewarded more than authorship. The more legible the choice or offering, the more praise it receives. The quieter, stranger, more personal choices require confidence that the system doesn’t help scaffold.
On the Gendered Burden of Decision-Making
We tell women, “It’s your day,” and then hand them the full burden of decision-making, emotional diplomacy, and meaning-mining. Bridal panic isn’t just aesthetic, it’s foundational.
Decisiveness is demanded without authority. Confidence is expected without support.
This is why so many brides feel alone even when surrounded by people, and why partnership matters here not as romance, but as infrastructure.
A partner who shows up as an anchor, one who treats the wedding as shared emotional labor rather than a solo project, fundamentally changes the experience. When that support is absent, the bride becomes the sole author, editor, producer, and publicist of the event - an impossible workload for even the most Pinterest-educated among us. No amount of saved folders can compensate for bridal burnout.
Cool is not neutral
The problem with organizing bridal around “cool,” Kennedy and I lament, is not that the concept itself is shallow. It’s that coolness creates hierarchy.
The moment an industry chases cool, it begins to define what is not. And what is labeled “uncool” is rarely neutral. It is often coded - by race, by body, by class, by queerness, by ability.
The uncool bride isn’t a real person.She’s a warning label. A myth designed to other.
Once an industry accepts that myth, it begins to marginalize people who were never allowed to feel effortlessly “in.”
This is why the rise of the cool bride was not a harmless aesthetic shift of the early 2000s. It was a structural one.
Bridal’s Validation Problem
Kennedy jokes that bridal doesn’t need to be liked by RTW. Yet it keeps looking sideways, waiting for approval, translating itself through red carpets and fashion weeks as if legitimacy must be granted from elsewhere. But this is a misread of power.
To those of us ingrained in its machinations, bridal isn’t adjacent to fashion. It’s adjacent to meaning. It’s one of the only wardrobe categories where symbolism, identity, family dynamics, and embodiment collide in a single moment.
Its strength isn’t trend fluency.It is emotional gravity.
When bridal and its designers, retail leaders, and taste-makers forget this, it begins to chase relevance instead of resonance.
It tries to sit at the cool table while ignoring the table full of people who are already there for it.
A Quieter Form of Resistance
Resistance doesn’t always look rebellious. Sometimes it looks quiet.
For brides, it looks like choosing how you want to feel, not how you want to be perceived, releasing the need to be universally understood, or making a decision that belongs to you, even if it confuses someone else.
For the bride who feels lost, here’s a gentler place to start:Stop asking, what do I like?Ask instead: What do I want to feel like?
Choose three words. Not aesthetic ones. Nervous-system words.
Grounded.Magnetic.Untouchable.Tender.Defiant.Held.
Then let those words filter everything else.
Taste isn’t something you prove.It’s something you inhabit.
The same applies to designers. Create from your nervous system, not the cool ideal - and your people will find you.
For Kennedy, a fashion-savvy stylist who once hoped to work in archival preservation at a storied fashion house, but instead critiques (and sometimes participates in) the industry’s most visible rituals, resistance is more pronounced.
Her commentary draws strong reactions because it collapses a boundary that bridal culture prefers to keep intact: the separation between aesthetics and power. Her videos go viral not because they flatter, but because they articulate discomfort many people feel and haven’t learned to name.
In 2024, when she critiqued Olivia Culpo’s wedding look on TikTok, the response was swift… and telling. The backlash wasn’t really about the dress. It was about who is allowed to speak, and what kinds of critique bridal culture can tolerate.
By the larger media lexicon, Culpo’s wedding was described as “timeless,” “classic,” and “unimpeachable.” Kennedy’s commentary disrupted that narrative - not by being strategically cutting, but by refusing to treat wealth, visibility, and traditional beauty ideals as beyond analysis.
At the time of its debut, I remember thinking that the intensity of the reaction revealed something fragile beneath the surface of bridal culture: an insistence that certain weddings (often those aligned with money, whiteness, thinness, and tradition) should be exempt from the cultural mirror. I have since understood that when critique feels like an attack, it’s often because taste has been confused with virtue.
What unsettles parts of the industry isn’t that Kennedy is harsh. It’s that she is specific, and specificity threatens systems that rely on vagueness to survive.
Her TikTok walks so this Substack can run.
The Permission Slip
If Kennedy could hand both brides and the bridal industry a single permission slip, it would be this: release the need to be liked by the wrong audience.
For brides, that audience is the imaginary jury in their head.For the industry, it is the fashion world it keeps trying to impress.
The work is the same.
Stop auditioning.Start authoring.
Because the wedding that belongs to you will never be the one that satisfies everyone. It will be the one that makes you recognizable to yourself.
And when that happens, the panic softens. The noise fades.
And something steadier takes its place.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
showroomtheory.substack.com
