Our wedding was 14 years ago, and cost about $15K. We lived in NY at the time, and we could not find an "acceptable" locale that would meet social standards for less than $40K. We headed to Vegas and had a smaller but similar wedding celebration.
We had friends who did the full blown NY affair and managed to blow $100K. I have a cousin who celebrated her 10 year wedding anniversary by making the final payment on their wedding loan.
We were frugal, but there was still so much waste and so many choices made to avoid judgement. And yet, there still was a ton of judgement. Everything from suggesting a "cheap" wedding at the local Knights of Columbus, to a family member publicly stating that damaged goods girls get married in Vegas. And no, Elvis never made an appearance, we didn't get married in a drive through, or any of the other stupid comments that were sent our way. We always had a pretty good comeback, the marriage is what counts, and we had no plans on spending so much money on what is essentially a 5 hour party.
While getting to the wedding day was a bit of a challenge with all this positivity around us, it totally paid off for us in the end. We wound up charging the wedding costs, and using the cash we had saved to buy our first home, a small co-op apartment. Then we scrimped for the next year to pay off the credit card debt. Before our two year anniversary came around, hubby's job had relocated us 80 miles away, and we netted 3x our investment on the sale of our co-op, which became the down payment on our new home. It laid a great financial foundation for our marriage. :)