The 2027 Wedding Trends I'm Loving: Couples Doing Whatever the Hell They Want

I've spent this whole year watching couples quietly opt out of things nobody ever told them they were allowed to opt out of. I have apparently spent 2026 watching couples collectively realize that there is no wedding police. You don't want a bridal party? Cool. Don't care about doing a sparkler exit at 9:47 p.m. because the timeline says so? Please stay on the dance floor. Would you rather invite 40 people you actually know than 140 people you vaguely remember meeting at Thanksgiving? I support this.

And the funny thing is, none of my couples are doing these things because they're trying to be edgy or "nontraditional." They're just finally asking a very simple question: Do we actually want to do this?

I've watched that question make weddings SO much better. So when people ask me about wedding trends 2027, this is what I'd point at. Not colors or florals or whatever a magazine decided is happening next year. Just a shift in what couples are willing to spend their one day on. Here's my running list of the wedding traditions to ditch, based on what I've watched work at real weddings. Then the ones I'd keep, because every article like this skips that half, and I think it's the more useful one.

Wedding Traditions to Ditch: Apparently, We Don't Have to Invite Everyone We've Ever Met

I’m starting here because it's the hardest one, and the rest get easier once you've dealt with it. Most guest lists don't immediately come from the couple. They come from parents, from family, from that running assumption that if somebody was invited to your cousin's wedding in 2011 they now have to be invited. Then you spend your reception waving at people across a room.

The couples I photographed this year kept the list to people they wanted to talk to. Not small for the sake of small. A small guest list wedding isn't automatically a better one, but small enough that they could get to everybody. Rachel and Jeff put eight chairs on a terrace for their ceremony. Parents, siblings, the people who were around long before the wedding and would still be around long after.

I'm biased here, obviously. Rachel is my sister, and I was standing there as the photographer and the family at the same time, which is a strange way to shoot a wedding. However, I watched what that number did for them. Nobody was managing anything. Dinner in Bellagio ran long because none of us were ready for it to end. And that's the part I loved. I wasn't watching my sister do laps around a reception because she felt obligated to say hello to everybody. We were sitting around a table together, talking too long, eating, laughing, and nobody was trying to move us along to the next wedding thing. That's what the smaller guest list bought them. Their whole day is here if you want to see what that looked like. Their whole day is here if you want to see what that looked like.

Tiny tip if you're already fighting with your guest list: make your dream list together first. Don't start with your parents' lists and work backward. Write down the people you'd be sad not to spend real time with on your wedding day, then look at everything else. The order matters more than the number does.

Your Friends Can Just...Be Your Friends

A wedding without a bridal party used to feel like a statement. And I'm not anti-bridal party. If the idea of getting ready with your six best friends, having them stand beside you, and making a whole thing out of it makes you excited…DO IT.

I'm anti giving people jobs because weddings have always given those people jobs. This is usually the first thing people put on their list of wedding traditions to ditch, and I think they're half right. Nobody brings up the trade-off, so I will. Now it's mostly a scheduling decision. Eight or ten people in a wedding party means eight or ten people spend a chunk of your day standing around waiting to be photographed. They're at your wedding, technically, but they're on duty. Your closest friends end up watching your whole afternoon from a staging area. These days, I think it’s often just a couple deciding they’d rather have their friends there to actually enjoy the wedding than give everyone a job. 

What I’ve seen more of lately is couples keeping the people and dropping the assignment. Their friends still get ready with them if they want to, hang out during the day, show up in the photos when it makes sense, and then go enjoy the party like everyone else. Which is such a wild concept, I know.

Your best friend can drink champagne with you, cry when she sees you dressed, fix your veil, take photos with you, and absolutely destroy the dance floor later without an official job title and matching satin pajamas.

Please Go Enjoy Cocktail Hour

This is probably the part I have the most opinions about, partly because I’m the one who would be taking those photos. I'm not saying skip group photos. Take the ones that matter: you, your people, the ones you'll actually want. I'm saying you don't need forty minutes of them. Give me ten and go to cocktail hour. I’d much rather give you a short, intentional block of time for family and wedding party portraits and then get you back to cocktail hour. That’s where your friends are actually being themselves. Someone is halfway through a story and using their entire body to tell it. Your college roommate is laughing so hard she has to put her drink down. Your dad has found somebody he hasn’t seen in ten years, and suddenly neither of them is in any hurry to go anywhere. Those photos make me so freaking happy, because THAT'S your friend. Not the version standing shoulder-to-shoulder staring at me because I said, "Okay everyone look here!" At Abbie and Tony's wedding at Skamania Lodge, the thing I remember most wasn’t a perfectly arranged portrait. It was how easily people moved between conversations, drinks, and the different spaces throughout the evening. Nobody seemed particularly interested in rushing off to the next thing, which is exactly what you hope for when you’ve brought all your favorite people together. 

Do You Actually Want a Send-Off?

A no-send-off wedding is close to standard with my couples now, and I get why. It might be the most common of the wedding traditions to ditch right now, and probably the easiest one to let go of. A traditional send-off means asking everyone who’s still having a good time to stop what they’re doing, head outside, grab sparklers or whatever else you’ve chosen, and line up for an exit. Usually right when the reception has finally loosened up, and everyone is settled in. Meaning you leave your own party to stage leaving your own party. I'm sorry, but when you say it out loud…

More couples are just staying. They keep dancing, keep talking, have one more drink, and the night ends when it ends with whoever is still there. That's almost always the best stretch of the day. Those last parts of the reception are some of my favorite things to photograph, because nobody is thinking about the timeline anymore. They're just hanging out.

If you LOVE a sparkler exit, do the sparkler exit. They can be ridiculously fun and I've photographed some great ones. But if the dance floor is finally going off and your favorite people are all there, I am not going to be the photographer dragging you outside because Pinterest says we need an exit photo.

If you'd rather end the night some other way, you could stay until the party winds down on its own, do a private last dance, end around a bonfire, grab late-night food, head to a bar with whoever is still standing, or just… go to bed when you're tired. Revolutionary, I know.

Your Wedding Does Not Need More Stuff

Can I save you some money? You do not need to fill every empty corner. Seriously. If you love the welcome sign, the custom cocktail napkins, six floral installations and the monogrammed matchbooks, I want you to have every single one. But if you're buying something because you saw it on a wedding checklist and now you're worried the table will look "empty" without it, you can probably skip it.

What's going away is the detail that's there because it's expected to be there. The sign in the corner, the arrangement on a table nobody sits at, the object whose entire job is filling a photograph. That shift is showing up in the details, too. Couples still care about what they wear, what they put on the tables, the flowers, the little things that make the wedding feel like them. They’re just less interested in adding something because it looks good in a wedding inspiration photo. 

At Pierce and Sierra’s wedding, I walked into their detail setup and stopped, which is not my normal reaction. Usually my brain goes straight into work mode: find the light, move this, straighten that, please do not knock over the perfume bottle. But it already made sense together. Nothing was there just to fill space. I shot it more or less as I found it, which rarely happens.

The details aren't disappearing. The unnecessary ones are. I'd rather photograph a handwritten note, the perfume you actually wear, your grandmother's jewelry, or the shoes you picked because you love them and not because they're the "bridal" choice.

The Timeline Is Supposed to Help You, Not Boss You Around

The best way I can describe this year is that many of the weddings started to feel more like a really good family dinner than a formal event. People weren't as worried about hitting every traditional wedding-day milestone right on schedule. If dinner ran a little long because everyone was talking, nobody seemed particularly interested in interrupting it just to stay on the timeline. If the cocktail hour was good, people stayed there. If the cocktail hour was good, people stayed there.

These weren't couples who cared less about their weddings or their photographs. Some of them were the most serious about photography I've worked with. They just weren't willing to let the schedule become the most important part of the day. And it shows up in the photos. When there's room in the day, people settle in and shoulders drop. You get the hug that lasts a little longer and the conversation that wasn't supposed to happen.

Here's what I'd actually do:

• Give yourself buffer around getting ready.

• Don't schedule family portraits down to the minute.

• Leave real time to eat dinner. You just got married, go eat.

• Don't put speeches, cake, first dances and sunset photos back-to-back-to-back-to-back.

• Give cocktail hour enough room to actually be cocktail hour.

• And please give yourselves ten minutes somewhere in the day where nobody needs anything from you.

A good timeline should make the wedding feel easier. If yours looks like a school bell schedule, we need to talk.

Things You Can Do Instead

"Okay, but then what do we do?" Fair question. Skipping something is the easy part. Replacing it is where people get stuck. Every list of wedding traditions to ditch stops right there. We've already covered the wedding party and the send-off, so here's everything else.

• Instead of a receiving line: go to cocktail hour and let people come find you.

• Instead of favors: put the money toward late-night food or another round of drinks. Nobody has ever driven home cradling a personalized koozie.

• Instead of a big cake cutting: order the dessert you actually want. Pie, donuts, whatever it is.

• Instead of traditional vows: read private vows to each other before the ceremony.

• Instead of a guest book: voice messages, letters, Polaroids. Something you'll open again.

That's the thing about alternative wedding traditions. They aren't about doing less. They're about spending the same time and money on something you'll care about in ten years.

The Wedding Traditions I'd Keep Every Time

I LOVE traditions. I love them when Grandma did it, Mom did it, and now you're doing it. I love the cultural ones that pull an entire room together, the weird family ones nobody outside your family understands, and the thing you've dreamed about since you were twelve. I just don't think "that's what people do at weddings" is a good enough reason by itself.

Here's where I part ways with most alternative wedding traditions lists: they treat tradition itself as the problem, when the actual problem is doing something only because it's expected.

The Wedding Traditions I'd Keep Every Time

A tradition that belongs to your family. Fountane and Shane started their day with a tea ceremony at the Airbnb before heading to The Castaway, with family who'd flown in from China. It was quiet and perfect. People sat close, laughing softly, getting emotional when they thought nobody was watching. My little photographer heart was done for. It also gave everyone a reason to be in one room before the day picked up speed. Give me THAT over a tradition somebody added to the timeline because Google told them to.

A first look, if you want the time. Matt rode to Bridal Veil Lakes with something covering his eyes because he did not want to accidentally see Nicole first. Nobody asked him to do that, and it wasn't for the photos. It mattered to him that much. Then the two of them got a few quiet minutes together before anything else started.

Family portraits, when the family traveled. Yes, I just spent half this blog telling you that you don't need an hour of formal photos. And yes, at The Castaway we spent almost an hour doing them. Because their family had flown in from across the world, and this was the only time everyone would be in the same place. Nobody minded. I never heard one "can we be done yet?" the whole time. They kept hugging and pulling one more person into the frame, and somewhere in the middle it stopped being a shot list.

That's the whole point. Keep the tradition when it's doing real work for the people in the room. Skip it when it's doing work for a template.

How to Decide Which Wedding Traditions to Ditch

There isn't a universal list of wedding traditions to ditch. There's yours. Sit down, just the two of you, and write out what matters to you about this day. Do it before anyone else sees it, because once other people are in the conversation, it gets hard to hear yourselves. Then run everything else against that list. Not "is this traditional?" but "does this serve what we just said we wanted?"

Some of what you assumed was non-negotiable will turn out to have come from somebody else, and some of what you filed under optional is the whole reason you're doing this.

Two questions I'd ask about anything sitting on your timeline:

• Who is this for?

• What are we giving up in order to do it?

If the answer to the first one is "nobody in particular" and the answer to the second is "an hour with our people," well…there's your answer.

What I Think Weddings Are Moving Toward in 2027

If I had to sum up wedding trends for 2027 in one sentence: less performing, more participating.

Smaller wedding parties. Guest lists built around who you actually want in the room. Longer dinners. Less disappearing for photos. More weekends where people get real time together instead of one packed afternoon. Fewer details bought because they're "bridal," and more things chosen because you like them.

Not minimal for the sake of minimal. Personal for the sake of personal.

Questions Couples Ask Me About This

Can we have a wedding without a bridal party? Yes, and it's getting more common. Your closest friends can get ready with you, be in the photos that matter, sit together at dinner, and close down the dance floor without anyone needing a title.

Is it okay to have a small guest list? Completely. A small guest list wedding isn't a lesser version of a big one. It usually just means you get to talk to everyone you invited, which was the point of inviting them.

Which wedding traditions are outdated in 2027? I'd push back on "outdated." A tradition isn't outdated because it's old — it's just not yours if it doesn't mean anything to you. That said, the ones I see couples skipping most are large bridal parties, long posed group-photo blocks, formal send-offs, and guest lists built around obligation.

What wedding traditions are worth keeping? The ones doing real work for the people in the room. A family tradition, a cultural ceremony, the thing you've pictured since you were twelve. If it means something to you, keep it.

Is it rude to skip wedding traditions? No. Someone might be disappointed, but that doesn't mean you've done something wrong. In my experience, guests have a good time when the couple is having a good time.

What can we do instead of a wedding send-off? Stay until the party winds down on its own, do a private last dance, end around a bonfire, grab late-night food, or head out with whoever is still standing.

Do we need wedding favors? No. If you want to spend that money on your guests, put it toward late-night food or another round of drinks.

What if our parents are upset about the guest list? Have the conversation early and be specific about what you're protecting instead of what you're cutting. "We want to actually talk to everyone we invite" lands very differently than "we're cutting the list."

Planning a Wedding That Actually Feels Like You? 

I'd love to hear what you're planning. If you're planning your wedding and currently staring at a timeline thinking, "Wait… do we seriously have to do all of this?" This is one of my favorite parts of helping my couples plan. We can talk through what you actually care about, how much time photos really need, which traditions mean something to your families, what you couldn't care less about, and how to build a day where you get to be there for it.

Keep the tea ceremony. Keep the hour of family photos because Grandma flew 6,000 miles to be there. Keep the sparkler exit if you've dreamed about it forever. Ditch the favor nobody wants. There are no bonus points for completing the entire wedding checklist. I want you looking back at your photos thinking, "Oh my gosh, that was so us," not, "Wow, we successfully completed a wedding.