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Just picture it: You arrive at your best friend’s wedding at a hometown pub, wearing a floor-length dress. Grapes and artichokes sit on tables for centerpieces. The bride walks down the aisle wearing a pink gown, calla lilies in hand. The bridesmaids are all in matching pantsuits. Welcome to a 2025 wedding.
These are only a few of this year’s biggest and most out-of-the-box wedding trends, predicted by wedding experts, as we near the end of engagement season.
The Knot reports that November through February is the most popular for people to pop the question — including Tom Holland, who recently proposed to to longtime girlfriend Zendaya over the holidays, and A-lister Selena Gomez, who announced in December that she and Benny Blanco are engaged.
As wedding planning season kicks off – and I’ve experienced it recently firsthand, with my sister getting married in less than two months — what can we expect to see at this year’s weddings?
“Reframing your wedding as a dedicated place to foster in yourself and the people you love is very relevant. So, I encourage people to think about what brings them joy, and usually, you can find cool ways to do that in a wedding,” Oregon-based wedding planner and consultant, Elisabeth Kramer, told me.
Floral arrangements minus the flowers
A signature centerpiece on the dinner table is the norm, but flowers aren’t as interesting as they once were — at least not by themselves.
Eva Lopez — who owns Cha Cha Linda, a vintage bridal store in New York City — says she’s seeing couples pair floral centerpieces with fruits and vegetables. Since foods have to match aesthetically with the flowers, they usually use dark or bright-colored ones, like lemons, limes, grapes, and artichokes.
Some couples are ditching the big flowers, and using succulents or tropical plants as centerpieces instead, according to Kramer. “I have a couple of clients who are legitimately planting trees when they get married, trying to create a lush or greenhouse feeling,” she says.
Kramer has also noticed that centerpieces are no longer in the middle of the table, with brides and grooms putting their floral budgets towards floral clouds, which hang right above the guests at dinner.
Calla lilies are here to stay
Flowers are essential for brides and bridesmaids to hold when they walk down the aisle, and there’s one flower reigning supreme in 2025: Calla lilies.
“They are bouquets with really long stems. It’s just chic and elegant,” Lopez says. “It’s got that architectural intrigue and feels powerful. It’s not like the light classic girly bridal look that’s been an aesthetic in the past.”
Cutting the cake-cutting
Once the dinner portion of the reception comes to a close, the wedding usually continues with a beloved tradition: cake.
However, according to Sarah Klingman – the owner of event planning service Mostest — couples are moving away from the cake-cutting ceremony entirely, which means ditching the cliche moment of feeding each other cake. Sometimes, you even see the supposedly sweet gesture of a groom putting a piece of cake on his newlywed’s face – which actually just ruins that makeup she spent hours doing.
“ They’re opting for less staged trends, and they might even like skip it entirely,” she explained. “Or they’re just cutting the cake without their guests watching, and privately taking a picture.”
And the bride wore blue
As a wedding guest, you know the rule to “never wear white,” since that’s the bride’s domain.
But in 2025, however, sometimes even the brides are avoiding white. Klingman says that she’s expecting more brides to choose color, in part because of how white has been used to represent the purity of brides in Western Culture.
“They’re still wearing feminine colors, think lavender or light pink. They’re just not that traditional like white because the modern girls aren’t as into that,” she explains. “And they just like another color.”
Bridesmaids in pantsuits
When my sister was in the middle of wedding planning in October, I chose a sky-blue, chiffon bridesmaid dress. Although we weren’t required to buy dresses from a specific store, my sister directed her bridal party to sites like Azazie and Birdy Grey, which have a range of bridesmaids’ dresses to choose from.
However, Klingman says that many bridesmaids in 2025 won’t be turning to these classic brands for dresses. Instead, she’s seeing a lot of women going for colorful jumpsuits and pantsuits, for something that can genuinely be worn again.
ChatGPT is helping grooms write their speeches
ChatGPT has entered the wedding planning chat — although think twice about it. Klingman shared that at a recent reception she saw a groom frantically turning to the internet to write his sweet speech to his now-wife.
“One groom generated his toast on Chat GPT one minute before he gave it,” she recalled, noting that he didn’t hesitate to tell all his friends that he did this. “It was hard to watch.”
Grooms are also doing outfit changes during the reception
Often, we see brides don multiple different looks: One for the ceremony, perhaps another for the reception, and maybe even a third for the afterparty. The first look – a wedding gown – is usually the most expensive, so brides tend to wear it for a decent amount of the reception too.
However, they aren’t the only ones taking part in the outfit-changing fun, with grooms increasingly in multiple looks for the day.
“At one wedding I went to, the groom changed into a different suit that was more colorful and playful,” Lopez explains. “For the third look, he kept the pants from the second look and changed into a really fun shirt that he got custom-made.”
Black tie weddings in a dive bar
The venue of the wedding often determines what your guests wear, such as more casual at a farm wedding or extra glam at a hotel ballroom.
But this year, who says you have to have a fancy venue to get all dressed up? Lopez predicts that couples will find more lowkey, but special, locations to get married in.
“Like a dive bar that has a lot of character,” she said. “It just feels funky, old school, and edgy in a way, but then you invite your guests to be really glamorous.”
So, what could we expect from brides-to-be Selena Gomez and Zendaya?
In 2024, many celebrities took their weddings abroad, with Millie Bobby Brown getting married in Italy and Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper tying the knot in Mexico. However, Lopez doesn’t think this will be the case in 2025, as she says she’s expecting more quiet elegance among celebrity couples. For Zendaya and Gomez, this could include private ceremonies at home or runaway elopements.
Still, Klingman has a hunch that the two brides-to-be will go all out for their nuptials, with destination wedding weekends full of planned events, with every expense covered by the couples. And for what they might wear, Klingman thinks refurbished vintage jewelry, with additional diamonds in it, is likely to make an appearance.
