The 2026 wedding trend: being yourself

When Nat Kim and snick Fernando began provision their george vancouver wedding party in 2024, the couple up, both designers, knew they had a specific vision for the event. 

"There were a lot of things that we were particular about," said Kim, 30, an interior designer. "We knew we were going to have to find unique alternatives to a lot of the typical wedding things."

In lieu of hiring a wedding planner, they did much of it themselves, finding their own vendors and poring over logistics. They even built some of their own set pieces, meant to serve as future family heirlooms.

"We were a real production factory in our apartment [in] the months leading up," she said.

For many young couples, the modern wedding has become an immersive experience through which their guests — and social media followers — can get a look into the unique tastes and personalities of the betrothed. When traditions are followed, they may be adapted to feel truer to the newlyweds. 

"It's become more of — I don't want to say, like, a performance, but it is, because there's just so many parts within it," said Cherith Chau, Toronto-based founder of Silkyi Events. "I think couples nowadays do want to make it more intentional and more authentic … between them two."

Wedding planner Lexy Scala traces the trend back to the COVID-19 pandemic. Couples were forced to prioritize their closest relationships over a huge party, giving rise to the intimate, intentional wedding. At the same time, wedding-related content began exploding in popularity. 

Data from Pinterest, often the first source of inspiration for the newly engaged, backs this up. In 2025, there were more than seven billion wedding-related searches worldwide, a 133 per cent increase over 2023, according to a spokesperson.

"From there, expectations and what's cool has changed a lot," said Scala, founder of Lexy Scala Events. "What the average bride is looking for is radically different than when I started in this area." 

Many of Scala's clients now want their guests to feel like they're at an exclusive experience, she said, akin to entering a "curated, other world." They also prefer for the planning process to be more collaborative, she said.

That also means that managing expectations is a big part of the job, Scala said, particularly in such a mood board-reliant culture.

"It's hard because … what you're seeing on social media is an incredibly high standard of work, generally, that's inaccessible for most people, even people that are willing to spend quite a bit of money." 

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The budget and logistics were a major reason why Kim and Fernando wanted to handle much of their wedding, which took place last August, themselves. 

For example, Kim wanted to include her late grandmother's hand-painted byeongpung, a Korean folding screen adorned with illustrations and calligraphy. But it was too fragile to ship over, so they did what any enterprising young couple would — they built one themselves out of birch plywood.

She described it as a messy scene, "sawdust and [wood] stain everywhere," with some specks of stain somehow ending up — and remaining — on the ceiling of their Vancouver apartment. 

Though it was a major undertaking, the process also let the couple further personalize the screen to their liking.

Instead of painting symbols on the panels, they cut out rectangular openings and hung bird of paradise flowers through them. The florals served as an alternative to the traditional Korean paintings usually seen on a byeongpung and were also a nod to tropical Sri Lanka, where they had recently visited and where Fernando's father is from.

When the couple realized they needed lighting for their dance floor, the solution seemed obvious. Enlisting the help of a friend, they churned out a series of custom lanterns in two varieties, again based on Korean designs. 

Ryanne Hollies and Brjánn Batista Bettencourt are a Toronto-based photographer couple specializing in weddings. When they first started out more than a decade ago, clients either were friends or hired them off their blogs. The bride and groom of one of their first gigs spent the day barefoot, kicking the event off with a group yoga session at 6 a.m.

"It really was a different time," Batista Bettencourt said.

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Now, as Hollies put it, "the algorithm gets you." Being online, they said, can train some couples to view their wedding as a visual asset first.

"I think authenticity is, like, the dirty word of the industry," said Batista Bettencourt.

But that doesn't mean they believe it's non-existent. They recalled one particularly memorable wedding Hollies photographed at the Revue Cinema, an independent theatre in Toronto's west end.

That couple tied in the groom's acting background and the bride's fashion experience to throw an event that literally felt like a movie, including popcorn and beer, a pre-ceremony "trailer" featuring clips from famous romantic films and a spaghetti western, second-hand-preferred dress code.

"It hit really well. It was perfect," Hollies said. 

And in Kim's case, social media led to a new opportunity. After her wedding, she posted online about her and Fernando's handmade wooden screen. Now, she is fielding commission requests from other couples and fellow designers.

"My new husband and I met in architecture school," Kim wrote in a Substack post explaining her process, "and our wedding was our first real design collaboration."

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