From the events of the actual ceremony to glamorous celebrations at the reception, weddings are often documented by content creators and lifestyle influencers, who can receive millions of views by giving their followers a behind-the-scenes look into the festivities.
Within the wedding genre, wedding dresses and outfits are a particularly popular subject. On TikTok alone, the hashtag #weddingdress has 9.6 billion views as is populated with videos of brides showing viewers how they found or made their dream outfit for the special day.
Here are some of the wedding dresses from 2022 that became explosively viral, along with the backstories about why they were chosen by the brides who pulled them off.
Veronika Lindberg, a knitting content creator with 240,000 YouTube subscribers, got married in June, and decided she wanted to knit her own wedding dress and document the process on her channel.
She spent around 200 hours creating the dress out of silk yarn, posting a 46-minute vlog, which has 3.4 million views, where she revealed the finished product at the end.
Lindberg, who lives in Helsinki, Finland, told Insider she was delighted to see how positively people reacted to it in her YouTube comments section and added that the success of the video fueled her own personal mission “to debunk the myth that knitting is something that only grannies in rocking chairs do.”
Read the full interview here.
Kiara Brokenbrough, who got married in February, wanted to have a simple wedding and spent just $500 on her ceremony and reception — significantly less than the average US cost of a wedding, which was $28,000 in 2021, according to wedding planning service The Knot.
Included in that price was her wedding dress, which she bought for $47 from Shein, an online retailer based in China.
Brokenbrough, who works as a social media manager in Los Angeles, told Insider she was happy she decided to have a modest and intimate ceremony and said she filmed content about her wedding for YouTube and TikTok to spread a message that “it’s more important to invest in your marriage than your wedding day or your outfit.”
Read the full interview here.
When it comes to unconventional weddings featured on social media, 24-year-old music student Luise Jäsche stole the show with her pink wedding suit which she bought from Zara to wear to her wedding.
Jäsche posted a slideshow of pictures from the wedding day on TikTok in February that went viral and received 2.4 million views. She told Insider that she had originally planned to wear a white dress, but had to find a last-minute replacement when it got unexpectedly stained just before the ceremony.
After finding the Zara suit with just one hour to go before she had to walk up the aisle, Jäsche told Insider she was relieved and ended up loving the way she looked on the day.
“I want people to know it’s OK to wear whatever you want because it’s your day. I really enjoyed it and I don’t regret it at all,” she said.
Read the full interview here.
Wedding dresses that veer away from the traditional white ballgown look have piqued much interest on social media this year, and Texas-based Madison Cervantes was another creator who went viral by showcasing a pink wedding outfit that she chose for her big day.
Cervantes told Insider that she was looking in stores for white dresses initially, but wasn’t able to find one she liked that was in her budget.
She then found a pink vintage dress on the clothing website Luulla, and paid $200 for it.
On August 18, the 28-year-old filmed herself trying on the dress to show her TikTok followers.
She posted a series of six videos about her wedding dress, which received more than 58 million cumulative views.
Read the full interview with Cervantes here.
Jillian Lynch, a 32-year-old bride from Ohio who got married in May, told Insider she was determined to find her wedding dress in a thrift store.
“Because I thrift all the time, it was just the option,” she said, adding, “I never even considered going to a bridal shop.”
After looking in different thrift stores for four days, Lynch came across a dress designed by influencer Camilla Coelho, which retailed at $220.
But when it came time to pay for the second-hand dress at the thrift shop, Lynch was charged $3.75.
When she revealed the dress to her TikTok followers on April 13, she received several comments from people telling her they loved it. While Lynch was previously unsure about whether she was going to officially make the gown her wedding dress, she said the comments convinced her.
“Hearing the feedback through TikTok that it looked like it was made for me, I do think that swayed me,” she said. “After making that TikTok, I fell more in love with it every time I tried it on. I felt really pretty in it.”
Read the full interview here.
When TikTokers share stories about wearing hand-me-downs and family heirlooms to their wedding, they often go viral and receive support from online commenters.
Jaime Guillory, 27, who got married in Laguna Beach, California, in May, told Insider that she had long considered wearing her mother’s 1989 lace dress to her wedding.
Guillory decided to repurpose the dress, making it shorter and removing some of the beading, to wear it to her wedding rehearsal, and said that she chose a white silk dress for the actual ceremony.
At the time, she posted a video on TikTok, in which she compared photos of her mother getting married in the original dress with pictures of her in the repurposed dress. It received 2.3 million views.
“My dad was emotional seeing me in the dress that his wife had worn on their wedding day,” she told Insider, adding, “It was really sweet.”
Read the full interview here.
Taylor Popik, who got married in New York City in August 2021, fell in love with a lace Tony Ward Bridal gown she found in Kleinfeld Bridal — a bridal salon that has appeared on the TLC reality TV series “Say Yes to the Dress.”
In a TikTok video posted on May 11, Popik said she spent over $5,000 on the gown, and loved it so much that she didn’t want to wear it just once.
Popik told Insider that she took the dress to a local tailor, who cut the gown right above the knee.
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“I love the way it came out. I’m so happy with it,” she said.
When Popik revealed to her TikTok followers that she had altered the dress, she was met with an overwhelmingly positive reaction.
“Wow so gorgeous,” and “This is such a great idea and it came out beautifully!” commenters wrote.
Read the full interview with Popik here.
For more stories like this, check out coverage from Insider’s Digital Culture team here.
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