House of Valentcia: Apr 12, 2013

Weddings are an aspect of fashion I have never quite thought of venturing into. However of late, I have already been involved in 3. A fellow designer once advised me, ‘NEVER DO WEDDINGS!!! They will eat you up pretty good.’

So I went ahead to try it out for myself (yes despite the warning). This will be a three part post highlighting the three weddings. They are of dear friends of mine, who approached me to help them out with the bridesmaid’s dresses, and I thought, though I may not have seen myself doing weddings, it would be great to help someone get their dream day fulfilled.

A few lessons I have learned during this period:

1. Let the bride have her way- Designers are visionaries. They always have ideas of how an outfit should look like for a particular occasion. When it comes to weddings though, the bride pretty much already has a clear cut understanding of how she would like her line up to look like. Unfortunately, it does suppress the creativity of the designer. How I learned to deal with this fact is, when it comes to weddings, I am there to help the bride bring her vision to life, not to tell her what I think. Besides, this day only comes once, so let the client have their way.

2. Uniformity – The trend nowadays seems to be, everyone on the line up, can have a design they are comfortable in. THIS CAN BE CHAOS! I was blessed to have three brides who supported the theory of uniformity. Getting 8 dresses done is quite a handful! Getting 8 dresses in different designs done is a volcano. And with different personalities to deal with, you may end up with more enemies than you first started. My advice for brides to be, Insist on uniformity. It will help avoid unnecessary stress.

Let us meet our first couple.

Waturi and Ernest

Waturi and Ernest were school mates of mine (university), whom I grew to love admire, and respect. I officially began getting to know this couple after I shared a class with Waturi.

The first time I met her, I thought to myself, “if ever we were to be given group work, I must get that girl in my group”. She looked too focused for me not to work with. She had such a beautiful and encouraging ambiance about her; warm, cheerful, positive; graceful; And I am not just saying it for the sake, but there are many witnesses to this statement.

My thought indeed came to pass, and we not only shared a class, but worked in the same group.

As for Ernest, I would occasionally bump into him in school. We officially started talking when I joined a bible study that he was leading, and it is at the same bible study that I got to know that they were dating. They were such an impactful couple that almost the whole school knew about them They were the model couple. Everyone knew that theirs was a match made in heaven; literally. It is for this reason I decided I couldn't pass an opportunity to be apart of making their wonderful union a success.

I could say so much about them, but for purposes of this post, I’ll end the story here. As for our friendship, the rest is history. If you would like to read more on their story click here.

Waturi and I went through a stage of selecting designs for her maids, and she eventually settled on a simple sleeveless design inspired by a green polka dot dress she has. (I couldn't get a picture of the dress :( )

The final sketch for the maids

She loved the simplicity of the design, and the slit detail at the front of the dress. I thought it just matched her persona beautifully. What I simply did was play around with her theme colours and the design of the dress she gave me. She also wanted a flower detail on the dress (which isn't on the original design) but wasn't sure where exactly to put it. I opted to have the flower placed at the beginning of the slit.

The maid of honors' dress was also a modification of a design she sent to me. I also played around with the design so as to have some sort of link to the bridesmaids dresses.