Melissa McVicker, right, of Providence, who is planning a May wedding, studies a dress from Wishing Well Bridal, East Providence, during yesterday’s Southern New England Bridal Expo. At left is Wishing Well co-owner Pam Duffy.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

PROVIDENCE — The economy may be in turmoil, but you wouldn’t get that from the crowds of young women who came to the Rhode Island Convention Center yesterday to check out the Southern England Bridal Expo.

Consider Noelle Bachand, who arrived with a friend to collect some information in anticipation of her June wedding at the Crown Plaza in Warwick. She expects the wedding tab to be about $40,000.

The 27-year-old Bachand, who works at a Residence Inn in Massachusetts and plans to marry Andrew Fink, who works for a college, acknowledged the dire economy but said she doesn’t intend to cut back on the costs that she says will be shared by “my parents, his parents and me.”

“It’s really too late to be worried. Besides, you only get married once.”’

And that sentiment, vendors say, is the reason they’re not seeing much doom and gloom in the wedding business this year.

“Weddings are a different breed,” proclaimed Charles Livingstone, who said his wedding-related bookings for his Johnston-based photography business are right on schedule for the coming year.

While he has noticed more people opting for smaller packages when it comes to family photos, Livingstone said those attitudes are not carrying over into the bridal field.

“The only real difference that I see is that brides are checking out more vendors before making a decision,” Livingstone said. “Instead of going to a couple, they will go to four or five.”

Linda O’Keefe, sales manager for the Radisson Airport Hotel, in Warwick, said she is seeing as many wedding bookings as in the past, but with smaller counts. “They will book a reception for 150 people instead of 200, which is great for us because we’re a hotel that can’t do a 300-person wedding,” she said.

Donna DiOrio, director of catering for the Providence Marriott, said she has 50 weddings already booked for this year — about twice the number that were held there last year. “People are still getting married. People are still spending money. When it comes to the wedding, the parents will do whatever it takes to make their daughter happy.”

Among those at the Bridal Expo was hair stylist Andrea Carrington, 24, of Scituate, who has her wedding to Dan Cline in August 2010 booked for the Oceancliff in Newport. To hold down costs, she said, she and her fiancé picked a Friday for the wedding because “Fridays are cheaper than Saturdays wherever you go.”

Fallon Jean-Gilles, a 25-year-old certified nursing assistant, said she and Lamartine Mercedat plan to be married in May in St. Michael Roman Catholic Church in Providence, with the reception at Lusitania’s in Cumberland.

She said she has “no idea how much we will spend” and is approaching the wedding with the philosophy that she’ll get only get what she can afford.

“See that ice sculpture over there? If we can get it we will get it, but if it is too much, we won’t,” she said. “If I have to get something I will get it, but I’m not too picky.”

Carol Lupoli, of Johnston, accompanied her daughter Michelle, 26, to the expo yesterday in anticipation of a wedding still 18 months away.

The coming wedding is “a little bigger” than the one she and her husband helped pay for their other daughter last year, she said, and she expects that the second one will cost 10 to 15 percent more than the $22,000 to $25,000 the couple dished out last time.

Carol Lupoli works at Brown University and her husband is an auto appraiser, and the incomes have made it possible to afford two weddings so close together. “We have great kids and they deserve it. However, if our son, who is 20, surprises me too, I’ll choke him because that will be a strain.”

With only a few exceptions, the vendors at the expo, which was sponsored in part by The Providence Journal, agreed that the wedding business seems to be more immune to fluctuations in the economy than other businesses.

Leslie Mignarri, who sells wedding gowns and dresses at her Bridal Gardens store in East Greenwich, said while “girls are more budget conscious” this year and may try to trim their costs by having a friend do the photography or bake the wedding cake, the trends point to good years ahead for the wedding business, with the number of eligible brides expected to grow by 7 percent by 2013.

To be sure, she said, some of the brides’ behaviors have changed. It used to be, she said, young women would come to the store and try out a few gowns and pick the one they liked. “Now they go on the Internet and look at dresses all day long, and then come in with pictures of the ones they want.”

And usually, she said, they are looking for discounts.

Rhonda Boehm, owner of Cakes by Rhonda, in Cranston, said one bride, in an effort to cut costs, told her to prepare a cake for 100 people even though there were 200 expected guests.

“Her philosophy was that not everyone eats the cake at a wedding anyway.

The Bridal Expo at the Rhode Island Convention Center was one of two in Rhode Island yesterday. The one at Rhodes on the Pawtuxet, in Cranston, might have drawn off some of the traffic, Boehm suggested.

But Bob Garafano, of Robert’s Tuxedo, wasn’t at all disappointed.

“With the economy being what it is, and the other bridal fair going on, we thought it was going to be dead,” he said. “But look at all these people.”

rdujardi@projo.com