'Look, Mommy Was in Vogue' Getting the magazine to cover your wedding is more prized than ever.

ON PAPER, THE COUPLE seemed perfect, ticking all the boxes for their wedding to be featured in Vogue: career, family history, luxury photographer and planner, couture gown.

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But after reviewing their submission, the magazine wasn't interested in moving forward. The couple lodged an appeal: Could they submit different images? What would move the needle? Vogue told them it just wasn’t a fit. “There are definitely couples who try pitching their weddings through multiple avenues—one of us will reject it, so they will try another editor without perhaps realizing that we are all discussing the weddings among us,” says a Vogue staffer. Wheel greasing is just the start of it. The competition to get weddings featured on Vogue's website has grown so fierce that fashion publicists are building whole arms of their business around the process. “Bridal was always this stepsister in the fashion industry—it’s like fashion forgot that they could make money on it," says Savannah Engel, who handled the PR for oil heiress Ivy Getty’s wedding. “There are three things that can always make money: porn, death, and weddings.” Under Engel, who has been a bridesmaid 39 times, the process can take ten months or more and involves helping couples find the right designers, photographers, and other vendors to ensure the event is fit for publication.

Wealthy people have always used weddings to display their riches and influence. What's curious is, now more than ever, people like Engel’s clients want to display those qualities in Vogue, whose cultural power, along with that of other legacy-media brands, has long been waning. Yet at a moment when anyone with a large social-media following is a microcelebrity, it has become more difficult to measure what it means to be a person of note. “If you're just Jane Doe influencer, being in Vogue is the only opportunity for you to really be cosigned by something that's an arbiter of taste,” says a publicist who has worked with top bridal designers. And for many, their only opportunity to be in Vogue is through their wedding. “