Can we chat about the rise in adult sleepovers? I love a “wholesome” activity, I love deep conversations, I especially love a pajama-couch-hang with the gals. I love everything about the idea of a slumber party for 30-year-olds—except the slumber part.
My nighttime routine is sacred. Plus, I spend enough time in beds that aren’t my own (a year ago that might have been a dating joke but now it’s a work joke that sounds like a dating joke).
Once upon a sleepover, my pre-teen friends (not me) decided we should watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I wasn’t allowed to watch PG-13 movies, much less a “Rated R” horror film.
I’ve also never been one for suspense. As a child, I’d lounge aside my grandfather’s round belly and yell for someone to “fast forward” through Scar’s “Be Prepared” scene in The Lion King—all while shielding grandpa’s eyes from the frightful picture.
So, on that spooky sleepover night, I sat behind the television with an Olympus FE-220 and captured photographs of my friends shielding their eyes from the “bloody, disgusting, dingy, ominous” (per a review on Google) film. We should have seen the Documentary Photographer writing on the wall.
I tell you this to say—I am not a movie critic. Please don’t take this newsletter series too seriously in regard to the characters of choice and my imaginary future for them.
As I reflected on how to make the “A Wedding for:” series both fun and newsworthy, Poor Things provided the material needed to address the future of weddings and reference a few trends from New York Bridal Fashion Week.
The Future of Weddings
I’m more of a Love Geek than a Wedding Geek. The couples I work with are brilliantly timeless—so I don’t have to pay much attention to the latest trends. However, I can’t help but peek when New York Bridal Fashion Week rolls around. (I also would love to attend next year.)
Women’s Wear Daily published a headline that stopped me dead in my Cinq-covered scroll. The headline reads:
Now this is the wedding news I want to stew about…
If you work in the wedding industry and aren’t thinking about these changing tides—it might be time.
Traditional weddings will continue to happen, at least for as long as I’ll live to see. I also believe, however, that I will live to see “The Wedding Template” (a term I really should trademark at this point) turned upside down, ripped in half, and pieced back together like a beautiful little scrapbook I’d make at aforementioned slumber parties.
While I may have grown up in a conservative home barring Rated R movies, I don’t shy away from counterculture discussions.
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Enter: Poor Things.
(P.S. SPOILER ALERT)
As Wendy Ide wrote in The Guardian, “…it’s hard to imagine that there will be a funnier, filthier or more extravagantly peculiar film this year than Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest picture…” Funny, filthy, and extravagantly peculiar. The exact recipe I desired for this edition of “A Wedding for:"
The unorthodox Bride of the Future is a character as free as Bella Baxter at the end of Poor Things—living alongside the company of Max and Toinette (her two lovers, of sorts).
We do see Bella almost marry Max in a fabulous mega-sleeve moment. I imagine, however, she doesn’t care for marriage anymore.

Love Party vs Wedding
I hosted a Love Party for my 2023 For the Kindred Workshop. There was pizza and live music and a disco ball and free booze and love and lesbians and hippies and cowboys. It was a fabulous time!
If a Poor Things Wedding does not exist, I do believe a Poor Things Love Party very well could.
The Scene
Inspiration for this party lives in Renaissance painting. It’s dark, moody, chaotic, and, eventually, everyone is nude. (Please don’t take the Renaissance reference too literally. I am a Suburban Aesthete in training and we have not arrived at the Art History lesson yet.)

Sometimes, deep in the trenches of Google research, I strike gold. The above painting was one of those lucky discoveries. The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis by Joachim Wtewael.
When the sea nymph Thetis married Peleus, hero of Thessaly, all the gods were invited but one—Eris, goddess of discord. Annoyed at this slight, she appeared anyway, wreaking havoc by tossing into the crowd an apple inscribed “for the fairest.” Juno, Venus, and Minerva would scramble for the prize, setting in motion the events that led to the Trojan War. — National Gallery of Art
While I certainly don’t believe War would ensue from a Poor Things Love Party, I do love the apple reference, and the ancient wedding scene, and the nudity—and the chaos.

Wardrobe
Holly Waddington won the 2024 Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Poor Things. Vogue described her work as “a sexually liberated fashion fantasia.” Retweet.
I think about wedding attire as costumes, wardrobe.
This year’s New York Bridal Fashion Week felt, from the view of my six-inch phone screen, exceptionally luscious. Designers and brands brought fanfare, frills, and a few significant trends for 2025 wedding fashion. The opulent, reimagined classic silhouettes play well for a Poor Things Love Party.


Libations
Enter: Poor Things merch. I hoped to find a replica of the martini glass Bella raises in the last scene of the film. Instead, I discovered Dante New York City’s Bella Martini:
Fords Gin (London)
French Vermouth (Paris)
Pisco (Peru)
White port (Lisbon)
Rosewater (Alexandria)
Photography
Do you still hire a photographer for a Love Party? My bias aside—of course. I imagine, however, the photographer of choice would hail from the fashion or cinematography scene. Similar to Anya Taylor-Joy’s choice to hire Sebastián Faena when she wed Malcolm McRae in secret.
If you’ve ever wondered why celebrity wedding photographs feel so cool—it’s because they’re not photographed like a wedding. Fashion-forward celebrities hire iconic photographers, industry friends. It’s why John Dolan’s perspective is so appreciated in the industry.
Want your wedding to look celeb-esque? Forgo any must-have photographs. Live your day. Dress well. Choose a photographer with a unique perspective.
Bonus hot take: I think post-millennia Gen Z couples will look to their cool friends with cameras over hiring a wedding photographer. Photographers, don’t fret: There’s plenty of unmarried Millennials who want you when the time comes.
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Oh…and all of the Poor Things Love Party guests slumber together in a big, grand, not-so-wholesome adult sleepover. Violà!
Next month, I plan to write about a ceremony in a Lutheran Church. The beauty of my Suburban Aesthete perspective—I see all sides of life!
Can anyone guess the movie?
xx
Brooke