Indian wedding clothes refer to the traditional attire worn by a wedding couple and wedding guests.
The bride is usually dressed up in auspicious colors. Many of the guests attending the wedding wear gold jewelry including the bride and sometimes the groom. The women are additionally adorned with henna patterns on their palms, hands, forearms, legs, and feet.
Indian weddings generally tend to continue for several days and new attire is worn each day. All these dresses and the colour symbolize the meaning of marriage and the period that follows it.
Indian Hindu weddings continue for several days. India is a country that defines diversity, and this is visible even in the wedding and its different styles. The ceremonies, the rituals, and the formalities are all different in each region and culture. In the North, starting with the tilak ceremony, each function has significance in the marriage. Tilak, sangeet, Haldi, baraat and the shaadi, all necessitate the bride and the bridegroom to wear new attire on each occasion. All these above ceremonies are known by different names in the other parts, e.g Simant puja in the west, or Mangalasnanam in the south and so on.
Many communities of South, West, and Eastern India adhere to their traditional costumes, i.e. Dhoti and Mundu by some communities of the South. Kurta or a shirt may be worn or sometimes just an angavastram may be used to cover the chest.
On the other hand, in the Northern parts, the bridegroom usually wears a sherwani, Jodhpuri suit, or a Western suit. The groom's face is veiled with a curtain of flowers which is called sehra in the North, which is not the custom elsewhere. It is also customary to wear a Taqiyah all through the ceremony in Muslim marriages.
The ensemble for bridegrooms includes sherwani, blended Indo-western suit and ethnic Jodhpuri suit. Embellishments are studded into the collars and the cuffs of the bridegroom's dress. Available both in simple cotton and splendid, royal raw silk, these kurta are preferred mostly by the bridegrooms.
The bride wears a wedding sari or lehenga according to the region. In Indian culture, the wedding dress of the bride comes from the groom's side as a shagun. Red is considered to be the most auspicious color among Hindus. While the sari is preferred as the bridal dress in South India, West, East India, traditional wear such as the mekhela sador is preferred in North-east India and brides of the North of India prefer Lehenga, Gagra Choli and Odhni as bridal dresses.
Christian marriage in India is mostly an adaptation of white weddings. The bridegroom usually wears a black suit or tuxedo. The bride usually wears a white gown or white dress. Among the South Canarese Christians: Some brides wear the gown to church ceremonies, then change into the sari, after the wedding dances in their wedding receptions. In the erstwhile South Canara area, Christian grooms would wear the dhoti to their weddings, but dhotis' usages have been stopped since the 1960s, likely because of the westernisation or anglo-americanisation of male attire in South Asia.
A wedding is a ceremony in which two people are united in marriage. Wedding traditions and customs vary greatly between cultures, ethnicities, races, religions, denominations, countries, social classes, and sexual orientations. Most wedding ceremonies involve an exchange of marriage vows by a couple; a presentation of a gift ; and a public proclamation of marriage by an authority figure or celebrant. Special wedding garments are often worn, and the ceremony is sometimes followed by a wedding reception. Music, poetry, prayers, or readings from religious texts or literature are also commonly incorporated into the ceremony, as well as superstitious customs.
A bride is a woman who is about to be married or who is a newlywed.
A sari is a drape (cloth) and a women's garment in the Indian subcontinent. It consists of an un-stitched stretch of woven fabric arranged over the body as a dress, with one end attached to the waist, while the other end rests over one shoulder as a stole, sometimes baring a part of the midriff. It may vary from 4.1 to 8.2 metres in length, and 60 to 120 centimetres in breadth, and is a form of ethnic wear in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan. There are various names and styles of sari manufacture and draping, the most common being the Nivi style. The sari is worn with a fitted bodice also called a choli and a petticoat called ghagra, parkar, or ul-pavadai. It remains fashionable in the Indian subcontinent today.
A wedding dress or bridal gown is the dress worn by the bride during a wedding ceremony. The color, style and ceremonial importance of the gown can depend on the religion and culture of the wedding participants. Wedding dresses hold a significant place in fashion, symbolizing personal expression, and cultural traditions and societal values. In Western culture, the wedding dress is most commonly white, a fashion made popular by Queen Victoria when she married in 1840. In Eastern cultures, brides often choose red to symbolize auspiciousness. These wedding dresses often represent a blend of heritage and contemporary trends, making them a pivotal aspect of bridal fashion and a reflection of evolving style in society.
Folk costume, traditional dress, traditional attire or folk attire, is clothing associated with a particular ethnic group, nation or region, and is an expression of cultural, religious or national identity. If the clothing is that of an ethnic group, it may also be called ethnic clothing or ethnic dress. Traditional clothing often has two forms: everyday wear, and formal wear. The word "costume" in this context is sometimes considered pejorative, as the word has more than one meaning, and thus "clothing", "dress", "attire" or "regalia" can be substituted without offense.
Clothing in India varies with the different ethnicities, geography, climate, and cultural traditions of the people of each region of India. Historically, clothing has evolved from simple garments like kaupina, langota, achkan, lungi, sari, to perform rituals and dances. In urban areas, western clothing is common and uniformly worn by people of all social levels. India also has a great diversity in terms of weaves, fibers, colors, and the material of clothing. Sometimes, color codes are followed in clothing based on the religion and ritual concerned. The clothing in India also encompasses a wide variety of Indian embroidery, prints, handwork, embellishments, and styles of wearing clothes. A wide mix of Indian traditional clothing and western styles can be seen in India.
Indo-Western clothing is the fusion of Western and South Asian fashion.
Khada dupatta is the traditional wedding dress of hyderabadi Muslim brides in the Indian subcontinent. It is an elaborate wedding ensemble comprising a kurta (tunic), chooridaar, and a 6-yard dupatta.
Punjabi wedding traditions are a strong reflection of Punjabi culture with ritual, song, dance, food, and dress that have evolved over centuries.
A langa voni is a traditional dress worn in South India by girls between puberty and marriage. It is also known as the two-piece sari or half sari. Girls younger than this may wear it on special occasions.
Ghagra choli is a type of ethnic clothing for women from India, notably in the Indian states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir and southern Nepal in Terai plains. In Punjab, the lehenga is traditionally worn with a kurti. It is a combination of the ghagra or lehenga and the choli (blouse). In contemporary and modern usage lehenga choli is the widely used term by fashion designers, trend setters, and boutiques in India, since ghagra is synonymous with the half-slip (petticoat) worn as an undergarment below the sari.
Pakistani clothing refers to the ethnic clothing that is typically worn by people in the country of Pakistan and by Pakistanis. Pakistani clothes express the culture of Pakistan, the demographics of Pakistan, and cultures from Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Kashmir regions of the country. The clothing in each region and culture of Pakistan reflect weather conditions, way of living, the textiles and embroidery used and its distinctive style which gives it a unique identity among all cultures.
Attire of Mangalorean Catholics refers to the traditional clothing of the Mangalorean Catholics from the Mangalore Diocese on the southwestern coast of India.
Shalwar kameez is a traditional combination dress worn by men and women in South Asia, and Central Asia.
Bahaghara is the Hindu wedding ceremony performed by Odia people in the Indian state of Odisha. It is the main ritual of an Odia Hindu wedding.
In the Punjab region, people wore cotton clothing. Both men and women wore knee-length tops. A scarf was worn over the tops which would be draped over the left shoulder and under the right. A large sheet would be further draped over one shoulder which would hang loose towards the knees. Both male and female wore a dhoti around the waist. Modern Punjabi dress has retained the dhoti, but over its long history has added other forms of dress.
Sindhi clothing are a part of the Sindhi culture. Sindhi women and men wear the Shalwar Qameez or the Kurta with Pyjama. Women also wear Sari or ghagra. However, before the adoption of the Shalwar kameez, kurta, the Sari as well as other articles of clothing, Sindhis had their own traditional costumes.
History of clothing in the Indian subcontinent can be traced to the Indus Valley civilization or earlier. Indians have mainly worn clothing made up of locally grown cotton. India was one of the first places where cotton was cultivated and used even as early as 2500 BCE during the Harappan era. The remnants of the ancient Indian clothing can be found in the figurines discovered from the sites near the Indus Valley civilisation, the rock-cut sculptures, the cave paintings, and human art forms found in temples and monuments. These scriptures view the figures of human wearing clothes which can be wrapped around the body. Taking the instances of the sari to that of turban and the dhoti, the traditional Indian wears were mostly tied around the body in various ways.
The wedding of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant was a 6-day event that took place from 12 July 2024 until the 30 July 2024 in the city of Mumbai, India at the Antilia building and Jio Convention Center. The groom was the son of Indian businessman Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in Asia, and Nita Ambani. Mukesh Ambani is the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, while the bride is the daughter of Viren Kumar Merchant, the CEO of a healthcare company.