Wedding rules: I dos and don'ts

Comedy waistcoats are out. Burgundy dresses are in. Etiquette guru Stuart Husband tells us how things should be done at the modern wedding, whether you're a friend, family, former wife or a star of the show

Stag and hen parties

Despite tentative moves to the contrary - well-meaning but inevitably fraught "meetings" of both factions at the end of a hard-grinding evening - these remain defiantly tribal events. With good reason. "Mixed-up nights are terribly grown-up, and a bit sad," says Kate Smallwood, a wedding journalist and adviser on the film Confetti. The experts also recommend simplicity in the planning. A weekend of drinking black beer in a death-metal dive in Tallinn, or paintballing in the nearest extreme-leisure facility, could add another few hundred pounds to an already over-stretched budget, and you'll surely face the most daunting stag/hen prospect of all; the queue for Ryanair check-in. Last year, Britons spent £450m on overseas hen and stag parties, and one in four of these ended up with the local British consulate or embassy getting involved to sort out lost passports or help arrested drunken revellers. And if they think the trouble you're in is your fault, you'll very likely now have to stump up some cash.

Who to invite

Yes, it would be a scream to invite all your exes along, if you're determined to turn the ceremony into some kind of Footballers' Wives style bacchanal of hair-pulling, home-truthing, and Joan Collins homage-ing. Yes, Camilla invited Andrew Parker Bowles to her second, but he'd had some decades' experience of upper-lip coagulation by then. So; current in, former out. Whether to include children is an all-or-nothing option. Try as you might to persuade yourself, they're not going to sit placidly through hours of speeches in their Ralph Lauren mini-tweeds while nibbling decorously on filet de boeuf bordelaise and earnestly discussing house prices. They're going to drink Sunny D, knock flowers on the floor, and fall down holes. So lay on the face paints and fish fingers, or risk fascist parent ire and bar them.

Overseas weddings

A cast-iron rule; if you can't afford to fly to Acapulco and spend two nights in the Boda Loca resort watching your friends get hitched, it isn't rude to say so. In fact, with as many as one in four British marriages now abroad, you have to face the possibility that they've flown to the Boda Loca resort to get away from you. Anyone contemplating a wedding in a Lapland elk shelter or halfway up an Aztec pyramid, and expecting even a smattering of diehards to trek into the wilderness with them, should mount a compensatory Lonely Planet operation, mimeographed sheets of flight offers, villa shares, local restaurants, recommended inoculations, mule rental possibilities, etc, and forget about presents. For once, you can say the words "my gift to you is my presence" without sounding sanctimonious. Well, actually, you will still sound sanctimonious, but you'll all have got through so much tequila/pepper vodka/local firewater that you'll be past caring.

Presents

You do want them, don't you? Then keep it list-at-John-Lewis-from-the-£1.50-pastry-brush-to-the-£500-occasional-table simple. Requests for donations toward, say, reforestation programmes in Malaysia are acceptable if you move in yurt-friendly circles, but blatant panhandling to offset honeymoon costs/ recoup wedding costs/buy a car are, respectively, vulgar, extremely vulgar, and wantonly vulgar. Compile your list with keyhole-surgery precision: you can't expect the same cavalcade of toasters, trouser presses, and Philippe Starck lemon squeezers to be proffered as you embark on a second or even third successful marriage. And try to bear in mind that it's costing the average guest between £300 to £400 to attend the wedding in the first place. So write them fulsome thank-you notes. On Smythson stationery.

What to wear

Between the extremes (Jordan's £25,000 "fairytale" gown, deluged in Swarovski crystals, and the £60 just-past-the-light-bulbs-and-the-swiss-rolls number in Asda), there are disquieting signs of colour experimentation breaking out in wedding-dress-land. True, few are going as far as Paula Yates, who wore audacious scarlet when she married Bob Geldof in 1986, or even Sarah Jessica Parker, who wore black at her wedding to Matthew Broderick in 1990. But 16 of the 31 wedding dresses on frock specialist Vera Wang's last catwalk were some rainbow-hued variant. "Five years ago, only about 2 or 3 per cent of dresses would be coloured," says Robert Devlin, chief executive of Pronuptia. "But now there's much more burgundy and pastel about. They're more popular for subsequent marriages, when I guess the suggestion of sophistication, rather than, er, its opposite, is the key." For men, there is just one rule; no comedy waistcoats. As to dress codes: "smart" is unimpeachable, "casual" a matter of taste; but the words "smart casual" together will deal the wedding a body blow from which it's unlikely to recover.

Best man

... or best woman? According to Deborah Joseph, editor of Wedding magazine, people - well, certain besilked and veiled people - are still reluctant to challenge this last bastion of gender stereotyping, because of their fear that sex may still, despite everyone's avowedly 21st-century mores, get in the way. "It's hard to imagine a woman standing up and paying this loving tribute to a man without the bride thinking there's some kind of inappropriate crush going on somewhere," she says. Which means you not only have a recipe for disaster, but also, and worse, for the kind of movie that Julia Roberts had the good sense to stop making about 11 years ago.

Speeches

The eternal verities govern the correct conduct of speech-making; don't go on too long, don't blind your audience with obscure in-jokes, and don't imagine this is the ideal time and place to reveal the bride and/or groom's rarefied, and possibly felonious, sexual predilections. If you weren't already a Bafta-strewn comic genius, you won't have miraculously morphed into one. "I've lost count of the number of weddings where the best man's done a terrible David Brent impression," says Kate Smallwood. "And now the brides are getting in on the act, which means you have four speeches to sit through. When they work, they're great. But don't do an Oscars speech and start thanking your primary school teacher. And keep props out of it. I can't tell you how hearts sink when Power Point presentations or video projections are assembled at the top table.

Catering

Vol-au-vents? So outré. Chocolate fountains? So over. The British foodie renaissance has conquered the wedding party to the degree that we're all consulting and tasting with chefs to create four-course bespoke dinners, says Darran Kimber, head chef at Oakley Court Hotel in Windsor, a reception mecca. Kimber has hand-crafted sausages, pies, and bread to happy-couple specifications. The template, he says, was set by Tom Parker Bowles serving hand-made cottage pie at his recent wedding. Though you may find that chitterlings and offal is still a hard-sell with the less Clerkenwell-savvy aunties or in-laws.

Civil ceremonies

We're still feeling our way into these, but if Sir Elton and David are any guides, there'll be a high degree of self-consciousness, a more-trad-than-trad temptation to dress like undertakers or doormen at upmarket hotels, and a higher-than-average pet count. But some same-sex couples are having fun with the wedding format: joint mixed-sex stag or hen nights, two best men, all off to Ibiza for the honeymoon. Hell, rules are for breaking.

The honeymoon

There's nothing to stop you inviting your friends on honeymoon with you but why would you want to? Really, haven't you got to the point where you can leave everyone else behind for a while? Web travel specialist opodo.co.uk reports a trend toward eco or ethical honeymoons - panda conservation in China, orphanages in Sri Lanka - presumably to discourage even the most tenacious hangers-on.