The Courthouse Wedding Is the Coolest Wedding Trend Right Now

Getting married is hot again, but apparently that doesn’t mean everyone dreams of a gigantic dress, hundreds of guests, and a party that lasts three days. The biggest wedding trend of the moment is actually taking place at city hall.I’m talking about the courthouse wedding. An intimate ceremony where you make the marriage official with just a handful of people present. Sometimes a big party follows later, but of course you can also simply leave it at that one moment. Why is that so popular now?What is a courthouse wedding?A courthouse wedding is a term for a civil marriage in a courthouse or city hall. The big difference is that couples deliberately turn that official part into a separate moment.For example, they get married on a weekday morning, drink champagne afterward with their inner circle, and possibly organize a larger wedding weeks or months later. That way, the legal part suddenly gets its own moment, instead of being squeezed into an already packed wedding day.Charli XCX and Dua Lipa paved the wayThat the courthouse wedding has now become a serious bridal moment is partly thanks to recent celebrity brides. Charli XCX married George Daniel in July 2025 at Hackney Town Hall in London. She wore a short Vivienne Westwood dress, a simple veil, and white heels. Two months later, a second wedding followed in Sicily, complete with a long, sheer dress. One marriage, two totally different vibes. We support.Dua Lipa and Callum Turner also first made their marriage official during a small ceremony at Old Marylebone Town Hall. Only a small group of family members and friends were there. Dua didn’t wear a traditional wedding dress, but an ivory Schiaparelli suit with gloves and an enormous hat. Bridal, but in the coolest way possible.And even more recently, Love Island UK stars Molly Smith and Tom Clare also chose a courthouse wedding. Molly wore a short white dress with a vintage headpiece, and the couple cut a small wedding cake afterward.Add Cosmopolitan as a preferred source in your Google search results.Use your Google account to add this to your settings.Is privacy the new luxury?We live in a time when almost every important moment immediately becomes content. Engagements are filmed, bachelorette parties get their own dress code, and sometimes a professionally edited reel of the wedding is already online within a few hours.That’s exactly why it feels luxurious not to share part of your marriage with everyone. A courthouse wedding is small, personal, and a little mysterious. And if you’re not there, you often only see the photos of the couple leaving city hall and walking down the steps, hand in hand and smiling—but very little of the moment itself remains visible. No two hundred pairs of eyes or distant acquaintances you haven’t spoken to in three years, just the people who are truly close to you. After all, not everything that matters has to be big or public.Small wedding, big fashionAnd then there are the outfits, because they secretly make this trend really very cool. The courthouse wedding now has a complete bridal aesthetic: short dresses, suits, sharp tailoring, slingbacks, gloves, sunglasses, and pillbox hats. Less Disney princess, more cool girl who got married on a Tuesday morning in London.That look isn’t entirely new, by the way. Bianca Jagger was already writing bridal fashion history in 1971 when she wore a white Yves Saint Laurent suit for her wedding to Mick Jagger in Saint-Tropez. She paired the famous Le Smoking blazer—with no blouse underneath—with a long skirt and a huge hat with a veil. Iconic, if you ask me.But do you suddenly have to get married twice now?Of course, there’s also a downside to this trend. For celebrities, the courthouse wedding is often not an alternative to a big wedding, but an extra part of it. First the intimate ceremony with a special suit, then the destination wedding with a gigantic dress, and then maybe even an after-party look. That means the courthouse wedding risks ending up in the same category as all the extra moments that have been added in recent years, such as the bridal shower, the bachelorette weekend, rehearsal dinner, and the brunch the morning after. The pressure!But just because celebrities often add a gigantic party afterward, that obviously doesn’t mean you have to do the same. A courthouse wedding can simply be your entire wedding—and that’s exactly what makes it so cool that this way of getting married is now being embraced as a full-fledged bridal aesthetic.Such a small civil ceremony can save a lot of money. If you keep it at that, you don’t need a huge venue, an elaborate dinner, or an endless guest list. Afterward, you can simply go out to eat with your favorite people, drink champagne at home, or head straight to the airport together. Small, personal, and affordable: sounds like the best day ever. And I think that’s ultimately exactly what your wedding day is meant to be.