UK wedding trends for 2025. What’s changed, and can we break the trend cycle?

Published by Claire Gould on

Header image by Cambridge wedding photographer Damien Vickers


If you’re newly engaged, a nearlywed or partway through wedding planning, welcome! English Wedding is a space for everyone in love, planning a wedding or celebration of their commitment. We see things a little differently here. The wedding media can be a virtual circus of inspiration and ideas – a visual feast for the eyes. That’s quite a fabulous thing. But there’s pressure online for weddings to be a certain way, to be aesthetically awesome and to follow trends.

Perhaps it’s time to break the wedding trend cycle.

Over recent years weddings have seen a shift in focus. Traditions are optional now. (Being given away, lobbing a bouquet at your single, female friends, for example. Having stationery. Having a cake. Having a registrar.) That’s pretty cool.

Celebrating your love in a way which fits your personalities is what modern weddings focus on. Planning a day for your favourite people, and making it one that they’ll tell you afterwards was “so YOU!” is the goal. It’s not about squeezing yourselves uncomfortably into a country mansion where you feel like you have to be on your best behaviour, or booking a wedding ‘package’ that doesn’t quite fit who you are. Weddings themselves are optional (honestly, if a big do isn’t for you, go elope!) and all of the traditions and trends associated with them are too.

If the 2020s has a wedding trend, it’s authenticity. It’s couples embracing who they are, and styling a wedding to fit. It’s realising that not everything on a wedding checklist is obligatory. It’s awareness that a wedding is just a day (or a weekend), but that it’s YOUR day. You don’t have to wear suits or white dresses, or dresses at all! The wedding trend I see emerging, year by year, is for weddings to become something entirely new, unstaged and utterly real.

Wedding photography has become a masterclass in genuine storytelling. It’s rarely about group shots or poses, but about capturing and preserving the feeling of your day. Emerging talents and instagram stars in wedding photography are sharing heartfelt moments, unposed and off-guard shots of couples whose love is what bursts from the screen. Amongst all the millions of images on social media, wedding photographers are winning with beautifully composed captures of real couples laughing, dancing and in love. Awkward posing, smiling ‘for’ the camera and guests saying ‘cheese’ are memories from the last century.

Social media feels as if it’s full up now. We document our lives and days, and share everything we do. Weddings are once-in-a-lifetime, elevated above the every day. They need to stand out and how we’re doing that in 2025 is with authenticity. Content creators are bringing the instant hit of social media shares, and their rise in the wedding world has been phenomenal. Are they a trend, or a reflection of our lives moving online, and moving faster? The social media landscape is facing seismic changes as we head into 2025, which is bound to impact the wedding media and any trend setting which relies on social platforms.

While trends in how we share wedding inspiration are inevitable, other changes need a solid kick up the arse to bring momentum. Exclusion is a major issue for the wedding industry. I still challenge bridal brands whose collections are promoted by skinny white models. This weekend I challenged a venue soon to launch its new ‘bridal suite’ – which feels like language from the 1980s and excludes so many couples. Shouldn’t we all be aware by now that not all weddings have a bride? The language across the wedding media is casually exclusive, with ‘bridal’ falling from our lips and fingertips as though all weddings were just a women’s thing, really.

And while it’s wonderful to see women-owned, independent and small businesses thrive in the UK wedding industry, we need to acknowledge that women shouldn’t be expected to plan weddings alone. Wedding stress and planxiety are real, and the media shoulders some responsibility for that. Planning a wedding is hard. It’s incredibly difficult to do alone, and even with friends and relatives helping out, it’s something to do as a couple. I’d love to see the phrase ‘my wedding’ disappear entirely. It should always be ‘our wedding’. And where there’s a groom, or two, I hope the wedding media will do more to welcome them to this whole crazy journey of wedding planning.

AI is emerging as a trend where wedding inspiration is concerned, and it’s a bad one. A handful of wedding instagram accounts are spearheaded by unachievable imagery of magical weddings in exotic places, bursting with unbelievable florals and glamour and opulence. But I believe couples are wise to the ways of the interweb, and won’t be sucked in by impossible imagery. It’s just a shame for wedding suppliers to see this content outshine the real life marvels they’re creating. And it’s a worry for some couples who might feel pressured into trying to achieve this online ‘wow’ factor by overspending and going into debt to design an ‘instaworthy’ wedding.

Would it be wrong to end this blog with some trend predictions for 2025 weddings?

I don’t think these really count as ‘trends’ – they’re 6 things I’d love to see more of in the coming year!

  1. Personality. Oodles of whatever will make your day ‘you’. Not a theme, more an approach to planning, a nod to styling and a day that has your names written all over it.
  2. Understanding of colours, tones, and palettes. Couples are really savvy in styling their weddings according to what they love – so don’t be dictated to by the wedding media’s colours of the year – do you, and trust that you’ll do it beautifully.
  3. Celebrants for everyone. Better than registrars, (sorry, but they are) with all the flexibility in the world, and available everywhere. They bring the joy.
  4. New traditions. Grandparents walking you down the aisle, pizza for breakfast, getting wed at 4pm. Keeping a firm hold on your bouquet and avoiding clichés.
  5. Awareness of the media, a critical eye. Question all the wedding content you see online. Enjoy the wedding magazines for what they are (catalogues of things they want you to buy). Everything is optional, and almost every page has a motive. Consume those which cost you nothing and bring you joy.
  6. Less stuff. There are 2 ways of thinking when it comes to weddings: It used to be that you have to buy stuff to have a wedding. In 2025, let’s reconsider how much we’re spending on single use wedding ‘stuff’ – and see weddings as experiences, not festivals of stuff!

Claire Gould

Claire spends her days writing - either in beautiful calligraphy or online. She lives on the edge of the English Lake District only minutes away from the beach, where she loves to escape and unwind. Claire's calligraphy can be found at www.byMoonandTide.com. Claire launched the English Wedding Blog in November 2009 - it's been a top 10 UK wedding blog ever since, with a regional focus we hope you LOVE.

1 Comment

Priti Shikotra · January 23, 2025 at 9:45 am

Pizza for breakfast sounds right up my street as a wedding guest! Needs to be a shake up in Indian weddings too!

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