Weddings & the performance of it

Weddings have always been performances. The only difference is that we've become better at producing them.

It's funny because we're constantly hearing that weddings are becoming more intimate. Guest lists are shrinking. Couples want "smaller celebrations." Personalisation has become the keyword. People don't want a big fat Indian wedding anymore, they want an experience. Yet somehow, the budgets haven't received the memo. If anything, they've only gone up.

The intimacy is real, perhaps. But so is the production.

We've managed to reduce the guest list from five hundred to three hundred while simultaneously increasing the number of people working the wedding. Between the bride's entry rehearsal and the fourth content creator crouching on the floor trying to capture the shot, it occurred to me that weddings today resemble fashion campaigns more than family functions. There are collaborators everywhere.

The designer. The jewellery house. The makeup artist. The beverage partner. The fragrance partner. The gifting partner. The pet outfit. The live illustrator. The content team following the bride around with an iPhone before she's even had breakfast. The drone operator. The after-party stylist. The person filming reactions to the person filming reactions to the reactions. 

At what point did a ceremony become a production set?

The irony is that all of this exists in the name of making the day feel personal. Yet the more personalised weddings become, the more they begin to resemble one another. The same Pinterest references. The same champagne tower. The same bridesmaid reveal. The same "candid" footage that required six retakes.

So who is the wedding actually for?

We like saying it's for the bride and groom. Is it though?

Because for someone who's repeatedly told that this is her day, the bride spends an extraordinary amount of it performing. Performing excitement. Performing gratitude. Performing tradition. Performing modernity. Looking beautiful but not too aware of it. Crying just enough. Smiling at exactly the right camera. Looking effortless after spending six hours becoming effortless.

We keep calling her modern. I don't think she's modern. I think she's exhausted. That sentence sat with me for months before it became The Modern Bridal Edit.

The intention was not to create another bridal event, there are enough of those already.  What interested me was something else entirely. Could fashion stop selling aspiration for a second and start asking questions instead? Could a runway behave like an essay?

Seven looks. Seven observations. 

A suit with a metallic tie and veil wasn't about tailoring. It was about the identity that women grieve after marriage. A Farshi kurta serving tea wasn't mocking tradition as much as asking why service continues to be romanticised as femininity. A corset wasn't simply about fashion's return to structure, but why women continue to find themselves squeezed into newer versions of old expectations. Perfume became memory. Bangles became an inheritance. A runaway bride walked away carrying photographs of her mother’s kitchen stitched into the hem of her dress because the heaviest thing a bride wears is the memories of random moments. 

The point was never to arrive at an answer. In fact, I'm increasingly suspicious of people who claim to have one. Curation, at least the way I understand it, isn't about presenting a polished perspective for people to applaud. It's about placing an observation in the middle of a room and watching what happens to it. Watching people disagree with it. Defend it. Reject it. See themselves in it.

If people walked away saying the clothes were beautiful, then I had simply organised another fashion show. But if they walked away debating whether the bride in the final look was selfish or free, whether the corset represented power or punishment, whether serving tea is hospitality or expectation, then perhaps the evening had done what it was supposed to.

Because fashion, to me, has never been the subject. It's only ever been the language.

What interests me are the stories stitched into it. The rituals we inherit without remembering who wrote them. The roles we rehearse so often they begin to feel like personality. The things we continue to perform simply because everyone before us did. Weddings, perhaps more than anything else, become a fascinating archive of all of this. They tell us what a society rewards, what it romanticises, what it expects from women and what it forgives in men. They're less about marriage and more about culture performing itself.

Which is why I don't think there is such a thing as the modern bride. We keep changing the venue, the décor, the playlist and the hashtags, but underneath the aesthetic upgrades, she is still carrying expectations that don't seem to evolve at quite the same pace. We've modernised the wedding faster than we've modernised what we ask of the woman standing in the middle of it.

If weddings are increasingly becoming performances, then who is the performance really for? And between the rituals, the cameras, and the choreography, when does the bride get to stop performing and simply exist?