Ticket to bride: Would you pay to go to stranger's wedding? Hundreds did
In early September, a bright pink poster began circulating online.
It wasn’t the usual wedding invitation for friends or relatives, but an open call to anyone willing to buy a ticket. Sales were handled through Nol Ticket, a legitimate platform better known for concerts and festivals.
“This is an ordinary wedding. But anyone who buys a ticket can come,” the poster read.
The “Untitled: Weddings” event quickly went viral. Online, some assumed it was performance art; others thought it was a club event with actors playing the bride and groom. A few were convinced the groom must be a DJ.
When the day arrived in Seoul on Saturday, they were all proven wrong.
There was a real bride, a real groom, and paying guests who had never met them.
“There were tons of rumors about who I was,” said Jo Kyu-kwon, the groom, who works at an advertising agency, Culture Infra, and has organized large-scale pop-up events. “I’ve done music festivals attended by tens of thousands of people.”
Jo said he came up with the idea out of frustration with Korea’s wedding traditions.
“I didn’t like the customs. For example, gathering people just to hand out invitations. It feels like an empty show,” he told The Korea Herald at the wedding. In Korea, couples often host small group meals as they distribute wedding invitations in person.
“Some people may like that, but it’s their choice,” he said. “My choice was to do it this way.”
For him, a wedding boiled down to two essentials: two people and a celebration.
“If you have those, that’s a wedding,” he said. More than anything, he wanted people to have fun.
“I think a wedding is basically a janchi (literally a feast in Korean). But at some point, it became all about how much we have to pay and whatnot. Why can’t it just be fun?” he said.
Tickets cost 50,000 won ($35), 100,000 won, or 150,000 won, following the usual 50,000-won increments used for wedding gifts in Korea. The cheaper tickets sold out almost immediately. In the end, organizers said about 500 people purchased tickets.
While unusual in Seoul, Jo’s idea of hosting a wedding with strangers isn’t entirely unheard of elsewhere.
Raquel Bour, 32, from Mexico, said she had seen similar events in Los Angeles and other parts of California.
“It’s common with influencers and people like that,” she said. “I didn’t expect it in Korea.”
Bour attended because a friend of hers happened to know the bride.
The wedding unfolded less like a formal ceremony and more like a festival, or the after-party to a wedding.
A DJ kept the dance floor alive as guests ate, drank and danced. Some played board games, while others sprawled on bean bags or leaned over the rooftop railing to watch Seoul’s international fireworks show, which happened to fall on the same day. In one corner, a fortune teller offered saju readings.
But the real spectacle was the attire. In Korea, where wedding etiquette usually discourages flashy outfits and most guests stick to black, this wedding was different.
Beforehand, ticket holders had debated online about what to wear to such an unconventional celebration. The poster had joked that there were no rules. Except that singles hoping to mingle should wear something colorful.
On the day, guests let their imaginations run wild. The crowd included tiaras and white dresses, a frog costume, even a Jesus and a Buddhist monk.
Almost anything went.
Two men, one dressed as Jesus and the other as a Buddhist monk, said they discovered the event on Instagram.
“We prepared our costumes together,” 26-year-old Kee Mu-sung, dressed as Jesus, said. “It felt like a fun opportunity. If I get married, I’d love to do something like this.”
For many, the event was exactly the kind of fun Jo had envisioned.
Song Chae-woo, in her 30s and dressed as a frog, danced energetically in one corner. She first heard about the wedding through a news article.
“I got married not too long ago,” she said. “If I had known a wedding like this was possible, I would have done it this way.”
She even approached Jo, whom she had never met before, and posed for photos by the photo wall.
“I knew it. I knew someone would show up in a costume like this,” Jo told her with a laugh.
However, not everyone was impressed.
Choi, a woman in her 40s who moved to Seoul from California, said she expected the event to be more organized, especially since it was listed as a concert on Nol Ticket.
“I think if they had focused more on the wedding part and made it feel like, ‘I’m getting married, come celebrate,’ it would have worked better,” she said.
“Right now, it feels more like monetizing than celebrating. And the actual guests don’t really want to mingle with strangers, so people are left wondering, 'Who am I supposed to talk to?'”
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