Cakes, like clowns, are deeply embedded in our culture. Wedding cake toppers, though often overlooked, reveal much about the social values and temporal contexts of those who manufacture, purchase, and use them. These decorative, diminutive ornaments reflect historic, present, and even fabulatory future structures of social, economic, and aesthetic meaning.
Like most seemingly innocuous objects, wedding cake toppers have much to reveal about the social values and temporal contexts of those who manufacture, purchase, and use them. Because they are additive, cake toppers appear to be purely “extra”: an aesthetic excess; an extravagant ornament; an inessential and nonfunctional object without use value. But decoration provides its own function, and cake toppers reflect historic, present, and even fabulatory future structures of social, economic, and aesthetic meaning. Though these ornaments can reify the patriarchal, institutional norms of marriage, they are supplementary, showy, and slippery.
My goal is not to supply an encyclopedic treatment of these materials, but to provide a scholarly framework for engaging an untapped repository of American visual and material culture.
In general, ornaments fall under two broad visual categories: (1) symbols and (2) icons. Symbolic wedding cake toppers employ associative imagery reliant on societal conventions of love, prosperity, and good fortune; iconic ornaments are those that intend to resemble or bear likeness to the married couple, thereby both standing for and representing their union. Symbol and icon are not mutually exclusive classifications.
Traditional and Iconic Representations
Many wedding cake toppers signal connections to tradition and the past. The conservative appeal of traditional iconic bride-and-groom toppers is self-evident. These objects are often heavily invested in pictorializing Eurocentric, heteronormative ideals of marriage life. The figures stand with a stiff, straight, vertical posture and the rigid frontality of Byzantine emperors or ancient Egyptian monarchs. Early examples that continue throughout the 20th-century depict able-bodied, slender, gendered couples, with men standing taller than their wives. These duos are essential the “Platonic ideal” of American man-and-wife passed off as universal, as these stock figures were intended to appeal to any and all potential consumers.
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Symbolic iterations define marriage in the abstract, while iconic versions convey what kinds of people occupy a place in the structure of marriage. The cake toppers may relate to an ongoing web of nostalgic and sentimental dreams of “the good old days,” but they additionally signal the specific marriage and partnership of the individual couple in the moment of their marriage. In this sense, each cake topper, when activated-when chosen for use and then enfolded into a ceremony-performs as a marker of the couple in real time. Wedding cake toppers also present dreams that couples and their communities may share when envisioning their futures.
A wedding cake topper can be symbolic and/or iconic, abstract and/or representational, past- and/or future-looking, but all iterations function as materialized fantasies.
Decoration and Its Significance
Decoration has its own use, and surely if there is a function that wedding cake toppers accomplish in addition to mediating fantasy, it is decorating. Feminist art historians and artists have already demonstrated the radical and subversive potential of decoration and excess, especially insofar as its relevance to people who have been construed as excessive, or marginal, or outside the scope of normative, canonical, patriarchal, Eurocentric art history.
Historically, or at least implied and suggested in the many reference materials I used for writing this article, it seems that the bride chooses the wedding cake topper, although any spouse can make this decision. Though dependent on circumstances like economic access and degree of bridal agency within the specific marriage context, there are degrees of agency and subjectivity in brides choosing-and often altering-their cake toppers.
Early twentieth-century examples of wedding cake toppers demonstrate efforts to personalize the mass-produced paradigms. Many cake toppers were personalized; that is, made to resemble the wedding couple. For example, the bride on the topper could be wearing material from the bride’s actual wedding gown. The hair color on the figure could also be changed - in one case the bride figure actually has an interchangeable plastic wig that could be changed to match the bride’s hair color. Another type of personalization might be changing the skin tone of the figures. The standard bride-and-groom figures may not have been accurate representations of many of the consumers who purchased them, but that didn’t prevent brides and bakers from altering them to accommodate a couple’s personal details.
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In offering only white couples, the available products signal that the dream marriage is something only for white consumers; these D.I.Y. Henderson identifies at least two 1940s chalkware couples “painted by the wedding couple or the baker” with dark skin tones, captioning each with “Unusual to see a personalized African-American couple in the 1940s era,” and “Unusual to find an African-American chalkware couple during this period.”
100 Years of Wedding Cakes and Toppers ★ Glam.com
Cosmetic changes to the physical appearance could be as simple as painting a groom’s hair blonde and adding a dark beard to the clean-shaven model. An unpainted plastic model suggests that blank couples “were made to personalize with one’s choice of color and fabric.” Cake ornaments adorned with textiles add another special touch to transform the universal one-size-fits-all abstracted cake topper into something more particular and intentionally representative. Brides swathed in pink and yellow satin wear fabric sourced from the “real” gown, indicating personal fashion but also tying the topper to the lived experience of the event.
These cases are just a few that illustrate the elastic possibilities of the cake topper and its significance. Each cake topper, in the shadow of a longstanding lineage of patriarchal dominance and control, can reinscribe regressive and oppressive constraints, tethering the object to entrenched traditions.
The wedding cake topper’s ability to elicit competing sorts of fantasy-fantasies of the idealized, nostalgic model of the normative wedded life, and fantasies of a transcendent and speculative “other” that exceeds traditional norms-makes sense with its status as a miniature.
This observation holds true for the wedding cake topper, which concentrates upon the single instance of the couple’s wedding ceremony, which comes to stand for a spectrum of other instances related to the couple, their relationship, their communities, and their values.
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Modern Adaptations and Inclusivity
Thanks to some young, venturesome companies capitalizing on the permutations of modern love, many of those keepsake bridal figurines that grace wedding cakes everywhere this time of year look strikingly different. While love may be blind, these companies’ racially interchangeable wedding toppers show that the opportunistic entrepreneur sees very well.
With their tweak of nuptial tradition, the companies are responding to changes in the complexion of romantic relationships. Census Bureau. While they are only a fraction of the 55 million married couples, their rate of growth has been remarkable - doubling every decade.
In 2000, Puebla, who is African American, was engaged to an Asian American man; both wanted a traditional affair, right down to the wedding-cake topper. “It was very challenging,” she said. “You want something that will reflect you. When we were looking, there wasn't anything out there. We ended up with flowers at the top of our cake - we got figurines, but they were doves, at the base of the cake. What do you do?”
The result was a classic expression of the Do It Yourself philosophy: After two years of planning, and with what Puebla said was close to $100,000 in seed money, Renellie, whose name combines the founders' first names, was launched in January. Both founders say the Renellie line of wedding-cake toppers - interchangeable, hand-painted porcelain bride and groom figurines with African-American, Asian, white and Latino ethnic facial features - was an immediate hit.
One of our customers said it was the first one he’d seen that didn’t look like a white man painted black,” Genuardi said. “Mostly what we get is, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s about time, there’s such a great need for this,’” Puebla said.
Same-sex cake toppers are also offered in both genders, in a nod to the latest controversial expression of love. Renellie's 7-inch figurines sell in pairs for about $70.
Melting Pot Gifts, a company based in Trenton, N.J., was started in 2002 to sell multiracial greeting cards. Melting Pot's cake toppers and figurines, made of what Emerson called “a poly-resin,” stand between 5 1/2 and 7 inches high, and are priced at $11 each. Even as the Melting Pot product line grows - “our next venture is to expand into wedding invitations,” Emerson said - challenges remain.
“We know the market is there, but sometimes it's hard to get people to find us,” she said. “Either interracial couples don’t think about it or they don’t realize the product is available.”
Puebla is well aware of the competition and, in the spirit of a businesswoman, insists Renellie’s is the better mousetrap: “Ours are made of durable porcelain, and they’re not hollow, it's completely solid,” she said. “We spent so much time in details; we looked at every set to make sure they were all different. We didn't want ours to look like all the others.”
But for her, the competition is all in the spirit of observing forms of love that, until too recently in American history, dared not speak the name. “It says we're getting to the point where we'll all get along, and it's a beautiful thing,” Puebla said. “We have a new generation that’s growing up.
