How I designed my Wedding Lehenga?

Having completed my graduation in Fashion Design, I was always the go-to person for my family and friends, to design outfits and style them for their weddings.

Knowing the ardous process, time and effort it takes to design the dream outfits, I was sure I didn’t want to do that for my wedding. And I set out to look for the perfect lehenga available in stores for myself.

Shopping for my wedding in the middle of a pandemic in December 2020, did not prove to be the best time due to the poor availability of stock and material and high prices.

Furthermore, calling it the curse of knowledge of knowing what will work for me and not and what I wanted in terms of colour, cut, style, even the size of the motifs and border, put me in a dilemma of sorts to find the perfect outfit which made me resort to the decision of designing it myself.

While designing, I kept the following things in mind:

1. My height and body shape:

I am all of 5ft 2 inches. So big borders and a lot of flair would overwhelm me. Hence, I opted for softer net dupattas with thinner embroidery borders. Along With,a less flared lehenga with small scale motifs all over, to compliment my body scale.

2. The colour of my skin:

Being of a warmer tone, I stuck to a pinkish red and a peach drape dupatta which repeated my skin colour.

3. My personal style:

I am more of a classic- romantic personal style. Hence, I knew I would be uncomfortable wearing extremely trendy cuts and embroidery or an unconventional colour scheme

4. Reusability of the outfit in the future:

One thing I followed with all of my outfits for the wedding and trousseau, was to ensure I get maximum wearability from my garments in the future. Both my dupattas have additional colours in the embroidery which will make it easier to pair it with a kurta/lehenga of those colours, in the future for any other wedding in the family.

Likewise, the embroidery on my lehenga was not extremely heavy, in order to pair it with a simpler blouse or jacket styled kurta in the future. And the blouse can be reworn with sarees as well.

5. My personal touch and significance of the start of my new journey in life:

I selected the motif of an elephant as my central theme for the main embroidery on my lehenga because an elephant is a symbol of good luck, wisdom, loyalty and longevity. Along with this the elephant was designed with its trunk raised as it showers positive energy out of the trunk into all surrounding beings and places and an elongated elephant would add height to my figure rather than a wider elephant motif.

The base border was not more than 8inches in length to ensure it does not cut my height.

Hope this little piece of information helps future brides to pick the perfect lehengas.