We woke up on May 31 to the news that Dua Lipa and Callum Turner got married in a civil ceremony at Old Marylebone Town Hall.
Lipa donned a Bianca Jagger-esque custom Schiaparelli couture pencil skirt, blazer, and the widest-brimmed hat we’ve seen this century, smiles galore as the just-married couple descended on the building steps. It immediately calls to mind a similarly British affair from last summer, when Charli xcx married The 1975’s George Daniel (in Vivienne Westwood, no less) at London’s Hackney Town Hall. Lipa then took another page out of the xcx rulebook for her reception/party/second-wedding hybrid in Palermo, sunkissed and beachside, with cig buffets a-plenty.
I’ve never really been one to fantasize about my wedding, but looking at both couples, one can’t help but feel like Shoshanna from Girls after learning Jessa isn't on Facebook: “You're so fucking classy.”
Courthouse weddings have become the coolest shindigs in pop culture. What’s so seemingly “classy” about them, especially regarding Dua and Charli, is that it feels more rooted in reality than, say, Nicola Peltz and Brooklyn Beckham’s Palm Beach estate, custom haute couture, $4 million, 600-guest gathering. Or the rumored-to-be-$50 million, 1,000-invitee production held at the world’s most famous arena over the Fourth of July weekend. Even though they wear their own couture and have their own seaside Italian after-parties, their events still feel a bit more relatable. If Charli xcx can get married at city hall wearing her signature wraparound sunglasses and bum a cig outside an Italian restaurant an eight-minute walk down the street, why can’t the rest of us?
But Dua and Charli aren’t the first to opt for civil ceremonies. We can track celebrity courthouse weddings all the way back to Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, who tied the knot at San Francisco City Hall, or George Harrison and Pattie Boyd at the Epsom register office in Surrey, or Mick & Bianca Jagger at St. Tropez Town Hall. But this rendition feels different, like a surprising, almost counterintuitive result of the post-COVID landscape, in which weddings (even city hall ones) happened either online, abridged, or postponed for months, if not years. Research from The Knot found that over 2 million couples got married in the US alone in 2025, with average wedding costs landing around $34k (the global wedding industry itself exceeds $1 trillion). Gen Zers now also make up around 40 percent of the US wedding market, a number that will only grow over time.
And thus, the city hall ceremony has become the antidote to the high-stress, weekends-long, multi-part extravaganzas that have become so commonplace that they feel like the only way to have a wedding, period. The city hall affair is the cool girl’s wedding, not really out of a lack of care so much as a lack of stress and pressure. And more and more couples have started to catch on: Google searches for city hall, courthouse, and town hall weddings have never been higher, and the internet is teeming with city-specific guides, Reddit threads, how-tos, and need-to-knows (one blog went so far as to provide side-by-side photos for brides debating between Brooklyn and NYC City Halls).
City hall photoshoots go viral at the drop of a hat (like this TikTok I didn’t even realize I’d saved until doing my research for this very piece), and more and more vintage shops are promoting courthouse-specific looks. It all makes me wonder if Gen Z’s Millennial Barn Wedding is slowly showing itself as a City Hall to-do.
So courthouse weddings have been on the rise with or without Dua and Charli’s help. But these two, specifically, have come in with a rendition that feels like it's after Gen Z’s heart. Eloping, in general, has become a more popular option as younger generations approach marriage with a sense of individuality and a less rigid view of what the event can be. While some influencers still use weddings as opportunities to cash in on brand deals, the likes of Hannah Chody (who went the municipal route at City Hall in Austin, TX) and Halley Kate have (or are planning to) elope or city hall it up.
Kate, specifically, made a TikTok in February explaining why she wouldn’t be having a big event and would instead opt for an elopement with a party afterward. “You are just as legally married if you spend zero dollars on a courthouse wedding or $1 million on a 500-person wedding,” Kate explained. “I just feel like we’ve kind of lost the plot of, like, what a wedding is.” The comments section was subsequently filled with people dropping their own city hall photos (“Spent $100 for this day,” one said, attaching a photo of her and her husband, while another quipped in agreement: “BUY A HOME INSTEAD OF A WEDDING!”).
There’s the cost appeal (it’s $25 to have a ceremony at the NYC City Clerk’s office), the decreased pressure, and the way it centers the actual partnership. A childhood friend eloped last year and told me he appreciated the lack of logistics he had to think about: “We didn’t have to deal with the headache and logistics of planning a party for 200 people, so we could just focus on enjoying the weekend how we wanted to.”
Weddings, in what’s become the “traditional” sense, have in themselves become a performance, often more about the guests and the perception than the actual union. There’s content, production, lookbooks, mood boards. Engagement shoots, engagement parties, bridal showers, bachelorette parties (complete with color-coded, often required attire), welcome dinners, after parties, farewell brunches. (Being a bridesmaid, let alone a bride, can set you back anywhere from $1,500 to $5,000.) Getting married has become the most important hosting gig of your life. It makes you wonder, when it’s all said and done, who the wedding was really for.
And the city hall renaissance doesn’t necessarily reject those things. Dua and Charli’s weddings were still events, still spectacles. They had multiple parts, parties, locations, and enough glam to fill Instagram feeds for weeks. Lipa followed her city hall ceremony with a Sicilian celebration that reportedly garnered mixed feelings from residents. Charli did her own version just a year earlier, a few kilometers west, more than a month after her civil ceremony. These weren't exactly modest affairs. They had that mix of pinned-up class and reckless hedonism, like a Europeanized Vegas hitch stretched across multiple weekends (and cities).
But the parts of these weddings that are the most extravagant and meticulous are often the most private. It feels kind of like the celebrity version of having the church ceremony for your grandma and then throwing it back to Tove Lo’s “discotits” at the reception. The public-facing part of the endeavor, the courthouse ceremony, still has personality, but it’s buttoned-up and relatively unassuming, classic enough for coverage from The Knot and BBC alike, while the gen pop is then left to piece together what the party looked like from cryptic online context clues and celeb/celeb-adjacent guest Instagram posts (I’ll never forget Benito Skinner’s Georgeli wedding dump).
It’s a club we’ll never see the inside of, the mystique of the celebrity still intact. Class-interested political analysts might have something to say about this.
If anything, the courthouse ceremony might be a reminder that marriage is ultimately just two people committing to each other, and its real appeal seems to be the inherent rejection of rigidity and formula, the freedom to decide what works for you and what doesn’t, for celebs, influencers, and normies alike. In a culture increasingly defined by personalization as much as assimilation, courthouse weddings feel like a distinctly Gen Z answer to a question that feels surprisingly overdue: If weddings can be anything, why do we keep pretending they have to be the same thing?
There is something undeniably cool about looking at an institution that has accumulated endless expectations and taking a fine-tooth comb to it, deciding which parts of it you actually want and passing on the rest. Standing on the fact that all you really need is a government official, a great outfit and the person you’re marrying, even if there’s a Mediterranean after-party to follow.
Images via Getty
