Remember when Blake Lively, California born and reared, went through her Southern belle phase?
The “Gossip Girl” star married Canadian-American Ryan Reynolds at Boone Hall Plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, in 2012. Two years later, Lively started Preserve, her short-lived lifestyle and e-commerce site that sold pricey clothing and home decor items that were inspired by “the allure” of the antebellum South.
The photos from Reynolds and Lively’s wedding apparently flourished on Pinterest and the Knot, two of the country’s biggest online wedding-planning platforms. The celebrity couple’s wedding, it seemed, provided inspiration for other brides with Southern belle ambitions and for couples looking to exchange vows in front of mansions and oaks dripping with Spanish moss.
But under new policies, Pinterest and Knot Worldwide will stop promoting wedding venues and content that romanticize former slave plantations, BuzzFeed News reported.
Sorry future Brides, but you can no more draw inspiration from Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds' Plantation Wedding. Pinterest has officially banned them to honour black men and women!
(📷: Getty) #blakelively #ryanreynolds #pinterest #plantationwedding #plantation pic.twitter.com/A6KWYZhD7l— frozencast (@frozencastmedia) December 7, 2019
The policy changes come after Color of Change, a civil rights advocacy group, urged the companies to stop glorifying “plantations as nostalgic sites of celebration,” according to a letter the organization wrote to Knot Worldwide, which owns the Knot and WeddingWire. A similar letter went to Pinterest.
“Plantations are physical reminders of one of the most horrific human rights abuses the world has ever seen,” said the letter to The Knot Worldwide, which was seen by BuzzFeed News. “The wedding industry routinely denies the violent conditions black people faced under chattel slavery by promoting plantations as romantic places to marry.”
A spokesperson for The Knot Worldwide told BuzzFeed that it was currently working on new guidelines that will bar wedding vendors from using language on their websites that glorifies, celebrates, or romanticizes plantation history.
Although plantations will still be able to list themselves as venues, the new Knot guidelines are meant to ensure that wedding vendors don’t use “elegant,” “charming” or other words that describe a history that includes slavery.
A Pinterest spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the company will restrict plantation wedding content on its website, and is working on de-indexing Google searches for plantation wedding.
“Weddings should be a symbol of love and unity. Plantations represent none of those things,” the Pinterest spokesperson told Buzzfeed News in an email. “We are working to limit the distribution of this content and accounts across our platform, and continue to not accept advertisements for them.”
Thanks to @ColorofChange, @TheKnot and @Pinterest won't let wedding vendors romanticize former slave plantations. (Bad news for Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds!) Why is it so easy to overlook the historical realities of what actually went down on plantations? pic.twitter.com/aritXF77gQ
— AFROPUNK (@afropunk) December 5, 2019
Plantation weddings have long been a popular option for Southern couples in an industry that made $76 billion in revenue in 2019, BuzzFeed News said.
Reynolds and Lively chose to marry at Boone Hall Plantation, where dozens of black people were enslaved in the pre-Civil War era. A year before the celebrity couple married, the New York Times mentioned Boone Hall Plantation in a story about how it and other destinations with the South were trying to address their slave-holding pasts.
The Times said the main house at Boone Hall Plantation is approached by an avenue of moss-draped ancient oaks. To the left are the brick slave dwellings, “placed so no visitor could have missed the immense wealth in human chattel.” Boone Hall, which was founded in 1681, offers tours to visitors and school groups that explore “the workings of a Carolina plantation,” though its website appears to keep mention of slavery off its main pages.
In 2018, the Boone Hall setting of the star couple’s wedding came up in a viral reply to a tweet that Reynolds wrote, in which he praised the film “Black Panther.”
“BELIEVE. THE. HYPE,” Reynolds tweeted to his almost 10 million followers. “All hail the king #WakandaForever.” But one of Reynolds’ followers suggested he was being a hypocrite by pointing out that “u got married on a plantation.”
The tweet initially garnered nearly 9,000 likes, 2,400 retweets and a number of comments, reports said.
u got married on a plantation https://t.co/b0SJv7EzS4
— image grocery (@othersightlines) February 18, 2018
Lively’s Preserve lifestyle site was similarly excoriated for romanticizing a time and a place when “black people were considered property, but oh, weren’t the clothes beautiful?” as Jezebel writer Kara Brown said in a critique of Preserve in 2014.
Brown’s post was in response to a newsletter Preserve published, titled “Allure of the Antebellum.” The newsletter featured a photo of a stylishly dressed white woman posing on a columned porch. The post praised Southern Belles for possessing “inherent social distinction” and setting “standards for style and appearance.”
But Brown said, “Women of inherent social distinction — aka rich? Soooo, slave owners then? Like, you’re definitely talking about people who owned slaves. Or perhaps, more accurately, the wives of slave owners who greatly benefited from and helped uphold the institution.”
Browned continued, “Anyone who romanticizes our nation’s antebellum period as some sort of marker of style and taste is definitely white and probably an (expletive).”
She also said, “Plantations are not to be romanticized. The fact that they stand as anything other museums or monuments to the slaves who built them is a stain on our nation and we should all be ashamed.”
AdWeek said in October 2015 that there several reasons Lively’s site failed, including the fact that it sold ridiculously overpriced products and that the actress, 32, had failed to establish herself as an authority in the lifestyle world.
But the no. 1 reason, AdWeek said, is that the site was “tone deaf.”
With the policy changes at Pinterest and The Knot, it looks like other sites are catching up to the idea that it’s similarly tone deaf to present Southern slave plantations as settings for romance or to become nostalgic for “a gracious” past.
