Money, to paraphrase the Beatles, can’t buy you love. But it can certainly buy a lavish wedding, as noted in Rebecca Mead’s new book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding . Indeed, according to Mead, America’s wedding industry exceeds 1 billion annually — an enormous sum that suggests how much weddings have become not only big business, but big fantasy. When people spend huge sums for a perfect wedding day, they are buying into a costly set of unspoken ideas about what a perfect wedding day means. The American wedding industry — with its professional planners, elaborate online registries, exotic honeymoon destinations and glossy staged memories — forms the subject of Mead’s book . A transplanted English journalist who has made a career writing for the New Yorker, Mead is a self-appointed student of American culture looking for insights into trends, patterns, values and ways that may be described as distinctly American.…