eddings are intimate rites; they are also public spectacle. The recent wedding of Junaid Safdar became both: a family ceremony that quickly turned into a national conversation. Debates flared over lehngas and dupattas, designers and guest lists; the bride’s choice of Indian couturiers was scrutinised alongside the much-discussed appearance of the mother of the groom. Images circulated widely; so did judgments.

Stepping back from the screens and memes, the episode feels less like a singular scandal and more like a familiar pattern. In Pakistan, elite weddings have become emotionally charged sites where wider resentments about power, privilege and scarcity are played out. The direction of the moral energy is rarely neutral. Too often, it settles on women, their clothes, their faces, their choices. That imbalance reveals as much about collective attitudes as it does about the families under scrutiny.

There is also a practical reason weddings attract such fixation. Structural grievances, rigged systems, opaque wealth and entrenched nepotism are abstract and difficult to confront directly. A wedding, by contrast, offers a visible stage on which moral judgment can be expressed without engaging with politics or policy. Sociological theories of strain and ritual suggest that when societies experience deep inequality and restricted access to opportunity, collective frustration often finds an outlet in highly public events such as weddings and birthdays. Put simply, it is easier to rage at a lehnga than to reform taxation or governance.

In this case, the debate acquired an additional layer through the politics of fashion. The bride’s decision to wear designs by Indian couturiers quickly spilt into geopolitical commentary, coming at a moment when relations between Pakistan and India remain strained. The discussion moved beyond questions of expense to interrogate loyalties, insinuations about the use of public money and whether art and couture can ever be disentangled from borders where power and politics are in play.

Public persons - and their families – are judged by standards that do not apply to ordinary citizens. When elected officials are ostentatious while large segments of the population struggle with economic insecurity, public resentment is not surprising. Scrutiny of privilege can be a healthy civic check if it presses for transparency and accountability.

However, that corrective often veers off course. The focus may shift from structures of power to surfaces, with predictable targets: clothes, jewellery and, increasingly, cosmetic procedures. The debate moves quickly towards who looked too bridal, whose make-up was excessive and who staged a dramatic ‘comeback,’ to borrow from Gen Z’s vocabulary. Viral commentary comparing the bride’s sari to outfits worn by Indian actresses further displaced questions of governance and accountability, replacing them with aesthetic judgment.

This is where the pattern becomes unmistakable. When outrage settles, it lands disproportionately on women. Elite women, in particular, are quick to be branded ‘characterless’ for being visible or celebrating wealth. Female politicians face an especially punishing double bind: they are expected to be educated and authoritative, yet modest, restrained and reassuringly domestic. One need only think of Benazir Bhutto, Oxford-educated, politically decisive, yet constantly required to perform propriety, marriage and respectability in public.

When women appear at family events dressed with confidence or flair, the same public that condemns elitism often treats appearance as evidence of moral failing. Social media commentary on Maryam Nawaz’s wardrobe choices and the bride’s designer outfits rapidly expanded into accusations that were as gendered as they were moralising. The underlying rule was familiar and revealing: when anger is directed at power, women’s visibility is policed first.

What is demanded of elite women, then, is a careful choreography of restraint. They are expected to be proud but not prideful; fashionable but not showy; politically present yet personally modest. Elite men move with far greater ease. Their luxury watches and other markers of wealth often pass without comment; if anything, excess is read as evidence of success rather than moral failure.

To understand why this dynamic resonates so powerfully, it helps to look to history. Public displays by elites have long been embedded in South Asian culture. In Mughal-era Punjab, weddings and royal celebrations functioned as civic theatre, with music, poetry and spectacle performed before the public. These rituals signalled loyalty and power as much as they marked private union. Contemporary elite weddings reproduce that grammar: ritualised displays of networks, taste and social capital, amplified exponentially by digital media.

If weddings serve as a release valve for collective frustration, our use of that valve is deeply flawed. There is no question that a frustrated public is entitled to call out excess and extravagance. But the manner and focus of that critique matter. When a woman’s body becomes the primary evidence of elite failure, attention is diverted from the systems that enable inequality in the first place.

A more productive form of public outrage would hold elites accountable without turning celebration into a witch hunt. It would acknowledge optics while demanding policy change in the same breath. It would critique privilege without converting women’s visibility into proof of moral deficiency.

Weddings will always be beautiful and complicated. They will always invite judgment. But if public anger is to become more than a momentary release, it must be directed at structures rather than silhouettes. Otherwise, the cost will continue to be borne by the same women, again and again.

The writer is an academician