Beautiful Bridal wrote a very funny post today:

http://beautiful-bridal.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-dont-want-green-wedding-and-you-cant.html

What makes brides afraid of the word g-r-e-e-n? It could be:

1. Hemp wedding dresses and cheesecloth veils
2. Bouquets made of turnip, carrot and cucumber flowers
3. Personalized brown paper bag favors full of compost
4. His and her John Deere tattoos
5. Rings made from melted-down fillings from Grandma’s teeth
6. Graham cracker and flaxseed wedding cakes
7. Free 8 x 10 from Sears instead of a bridal portrait
8. Canned food station at the reception
9. Bridesmaids with hairy armpits
10. Honeymoon in his parent’s spare room

For the past 6 months, the color gray has been promoted in fashion tomes and some wedding pages as the “new” chocolate — as the trendy wedding color. But, with the economy in the doldrums for at least the next few months, is gray just a bit too … dull? I’m having a hard time getting excited about it. Mustard yellow? Smashing. Silver or pewter? Right on. Maybe gray is just too mineral and not enough vegetable.

“A truly green economy means living lightly on the Earth with simple, joyful elegance.” (From Co-op America, first principle)

I really love the “simple, joyful elegance” part. Really says love, really says a gathering of friends and family : really says Weddings. (Sorry bridezilla!)

Let’s talk about ‘simple’ for a while. What is simple? What does simple really mean? Simple can mean unsophisticated — but it can also mean the essential — something that cannot be divided further.

So — when planning your green wedding, ask yourselves : What is our essence? What are our core values and beliefs? I think that that is what comes across in elegant people: their essentialness comes right through so gracefully. They can have a great richness about them, but fundamentally, they are simple. So — being conscious of your essential values and nature, will help throughout your selection process.

Joyful. Oh my. I study Energy Medicine, and in EM, there are two very simple energetic states: fear (protection mode) and joy (or health and growth). In Donna Eden’s version of Energy Medicine, these are called the radiant circuits. We share these energetic states with single cell creatures. These states are communicative : we all notice when a fearful/angry person comes into a room. We find happy people contagious. So, joy can be a very communal, sharing state. How do we help create the joyful state among our guests, and prevent the fearful state? (Some people call this skill having good manners.)

Awareness of these human conditions will help you create a simple, joyfully elegant celebration.

A new blog advises you to reduce the number of guests invited to your wedding. The reason? To reduce the amount of paper you have to use in your invitations and handouts.

Your wedding is an opportunity to express your commitment to our environment, but it’s far more important to do this every day in the office and at home. Your wedding is above all about the bounty of love, friendship. InviteSite’s passion for tree-free and 100% postconsumer recycled invitations is our reason for being here for you. Using e-mail is for business and saying “Whassup.” Using it to substitute for a formal announcement of two people and two families joining, is cheap and unsatisfying.

Demand is the only force in the world that will make alternative papers viable. You can be lavish with 100% postconsumer recycled papers and post harvest waste papers on your wedding day.

We’ve been seeing a lot of black used as an accent color for the past year. We use a black satin ribbon for our Garbo wedding invitation.

Something to consider, though, if you are thinking about using a black border framing your wedding invitation: black bordered cards have a rather grim use historically. Called “mourning paper” or mourning stationery, black bordered cards have been used for hundreds of years by widows and widowers.

I became really familiar with mourning stationery when I sold and catalogued rare books and manuscripts. If one was trying to date a letter signed by a famous 19th century writer (Yeats, Twain or Dickens for example) and it was written on a black bordered card, you knew a close family member or spouse, had died in the past year.

We’ve seen a few wedding invitation designs with black borders, and have to figure the designer doesn’t know much about stationery history. Black borders are intimately associated with the recent death of a spouse.

Wedding Invitations were really really boring until about 10 years ago. One company (Taylor Corp) owns most of the large commercial wedding invitation companies. They pretty much controlled the entire market.

About 13 years ago, right when the web started to gear up, a few brave couples wanted to individualize their weddings. They didn’t want the sweet embossed invites with angels and castles. The internet offered a chance to find unique vendors, and communicate with each other. At the same time, Martha Stewart launched Martha Stewart Weddings (the magazine).

Weddings, and the wedding invitation, would never be the same.

Letterpress also began to make inroads. Martha discovered Julie Holcomb printers, and featured her letterpress printed invitations, and even shot an episode with Martha at the press. That gave letterpress a jumpstart. (a few letterpress printers were experimenting at the same time.) Scott, my partner, had been printing letterpress as an artisan hobby since the mid 1980′s. I learned late 1995, with a local book group. Everyone was experimenting in their studios. But, most of these designers, such as Julie and Scott, came out of the fine printing and fine press movement. Julie studied with William Everson at UC Santa Cruz.

In 2001, there were only about 4 of us letterpress printers exhibiting at the National Stationery Show in NYC. Crane was trying to figure out how to get into letterpress. William Arthur was bought by Hallmark, and soon jumped on the letterpress bandwagon.

This year, it was just about all letterpress at the Stationery Show. Scads of great designers out of art school. Amazing.

Amazing!!

So what does desire for a fabulously modern wedding invitation have to do with Oscar Wilde?

We think it’s delicious that the trend for highly creative wedding invitations has its roots in the Aesthetic Movement of the early 20th century.

Beautiful papers (inspired by the opening of Japanese design to European artists), fine letterpress printing (the Fine Presses of the Arts & Crafts movement), theatrical graphic design: all reached a zenith in the late 1920′s. Beautiful books were laboriously produced in limited editions of a few hundred or so. The Great Depression put an end to these amazingly beautiful book productions.
Commercial printing and graphic design went through another series of upheavals through the mid century. The ascendance of the offset press over letterpress, for example. (During the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s letterpress equipment was phased out and junked.)

But none of these changes were as profound as when Computer Graphics and computerized prepress took over in the 1980′s and 1990′s.

Art schools and Graphic Design schools underwent an utter revolution. Design technology was completely decoupled from the previous technologies and printing equipment. Proof presses and type cabinets were left stranded. What happened, in effect, is that the outmoded printing equipment could be used exclusively for artistic expression.

Fine printers, typographers and graphic design professors all have a great sense of history, but many of their students didn’t have a clue about anything that came before computer generated fonts and graphics. More and more graphic design teachers began to offer classes in handset type and the old printing techniques. (Previously, this was only taught to as a trade class in high school!) Art Center, The Center for the Book, and a few other schools became an important influence on the re-introduction of letterpress as a craft. Book Arts became an important movement again, with beautiful limited editions and unique books as objects becoming quite popular to produce. These books are irresistably beautiful, but it is near impossible to make a living producing them. The techniques that people developed began to move into invitation design in the 1990′s and really took off in the past few years.
Contrary to what the wedding magazines tell you, most invitations from the late 19th century through the 20th century were letterpress printed, not engraved. The invitation stock may have embossed borders and decorative elements, but the invitation itself was usually printed letterpress with handset or linotype. (we have a large collections of early invitations from about 1840 – 1940) The printing quality wasn’t always great.
What has changed is, the invitation itself has become an artistic expression of high craft and aesthetics.
Oscar Wilde would be charmed.
“Artists’ books are books or book-like objects, over the final appearance of which an artist has had a high degree of control; where the book is intended as a work of art in itself. They are not books of reproductions of an artist’s work, about an artist, or with just a text or illustrations by an artist”
From: Artists’ books : the book as a work of art, 1963-1995 by Stephen Bury
In other words, the book as a stand alone object. The Wedding Invitation has also become an artifact.

The Democratic National Convention, held in August in Denver, has created strong environmental mandates and standards about food (local and healthy), catering supplies (compostable), transportation, and Democratic Party related consumer goods. (fanny packs, totes, etc) Some good people are on board to help them pull it off, but so far, the press has reported only on problems. Last week in the Wall Street Journal and this weekend in the NY Times. Some of the catering companies have been moaning about the local food requirements.
If the organizers can pull this off, it will do great things for the green events cause.

Invitesite’s eco wedding invitations are featured in the upcoming local ABC News feature on Green Weddings. Great stuff and good suggestions.

Yipee,  a group of local green wedding vendors will be exhibiting at the upcoming Los Feliz Street Fair, Sunday June 8th, 11 am – 8pm. We will be located in the “Green Scene” Eco Showcase. 
Our group includes Angelica from Angelique Events and GreenWeddings.net. Cake, signature drinks and some neat giveaways are in the offing… Invitesite will be showing some of our fabulous new eco wedding invitations.

Will update more today — looks like some fabulous bands will be playing.