A “ginormous” chandelier was the first indication that a bride and her wedding designer had different ideas about minimalism. Devika Narain had asked the bride for a photograph of the wedding she wanted, and what came back was an elaborate all-white setting.
“I told her this is not actually minimal,” Narain recalls, though the bride disagreed. “But it’s all white, right?”
Minimalism might describe an absence of colour to one person, a sparsely decorated room to another, which is why Narain asks clients to show her what they have in mind when they use words like ‘minimal’, ‘maximal’ or ‘vintage’. “What is good about websites like Pinterest is that they help to quantify words and thoughts,” says Narain, founder and creative director of Devika Narain & Co.
There's pleasure in assembling a wedding moodboard without having to call a caterer afterwards. You can save an elaborate floral installation without worrying about whether the ceiling will support it, or a table setting without considering how anyone will eat around it. And wanting something you've seen at another wedding is hardly an offence. Weddings have always borrowed from other weddings, whether through family customs, fashion or the enthusiasm with which a floral arrangement makes its way around the industry.
The sheer volume of inspiration available does make choosing more complicated. Save one image or wedding moodboard and your social media feed will offer twenty variations, until your algorithm starts looking like consensus. A colour combination that caught your attention last week is suddenly everywhere. You might genuinely love it, or you might have spent so much time looking at it that other possibilities have become difficult to imagine.
For a period, Narain banned Pinterest in her office, asking her team to develop ideas before searching for images that could communicate them. She began writing down what she wanted to do with a space, wary of how easily repeated exposure to an aesthetic could influence her own preferences. “When you’re constantly bombarded with so many visuals, your mind fools you into thinking that’s what is nice, what's going to be permanent or be something you enjoy.”
Even when a client comes armed with references, Narain would rather interpret them than reproduce them. “My job primarily is to be the expert on the table, which means I translate those first few images that come versus copy them,” she says. She compares the difference to that between a fashion designer and a tailor. “A fashion designer will look at references and create something new. A tailor is more likely to recreate and copy the blouse you give them. It's not the same.”
One client brought Narain an AI-generated image of an elaborate installation suspended over the sea and asked whether it could be recreated. It might have worked over a pool or lake, she explains, but the image had conveniently created an ocean without movement. She's also been shown AI images of ceilings covered entirely in flowers, with nothing apparently holding them up.
“The number of times I’ve been sitting with an AI image saying, ‘We cannot do this’,” she says. “People can’t tell the difference today between an AI image and a real image.”
A photograph of somebody else's wedding at least offers evidence that the setting existed. Now a moodboard might contain elaborate installations that have never been constructed, with no obvious way for the person collecting the images to tell the difference.
Narain would rather begin a wedding brief with a conversation about places and experiences than a folder of photographs. She asks couples to remember an event or a space they loved, then one they hated, and wants to know what they enjoy doing together and what their families enjoy when everyone gathers. Only later does she ask for images, preferably from outside weddings. A hotel, a bar, an outfit, a painting or a colour palette noticed somewhere else can tell her more than anything saved from someone else's wedding.
One couple Narain worked with had to postpone their wedding following a health emergency in the family. Months later, when she asked whether they wanted to revisit the plans, they declined. “Our wedding is so us,” they told her. “Why would we want to change it?”
“It needs to be so intrinsically you that it needs to transcend time,” Narain says.
Years from now, the clothes, flowers and photographs will probably give away when a wedding took place. Tastes change, and it would be strange to expect a couple to feel exactly the same about every decision decades later. But there's a difference between outgrowing something you genuinely loved and looking back at a wedding full of choices you can't remember wanting.
“You can go redo your house if you did something which was trendy back then,” Narain says. “But you don’t get to redo your wedding.”
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