A groom sat across from me a few months ago with his phone open to a moodboard of powder blue bandhgalas, and within the same breath told me his mother had already picked out his baraat sherwani in deep maroon. His fiancee's family, meanwhile, wanted a Kanjeevaram-gold half sherwani for the muhurtham. Three visions, one man, one wedding week. This is more common than people think, and it is honestly one of my favourite kinds of brief to work on, because it asks a stylist to do what a stylist actually exists to do: translate between people, not just dress one of them.
India is not one wedding, it is a hundred regional grammars stitched together under a single word, and a modern groom often has to speak several of them in a single week. Red and deep maroon still hold ceremonial weight for a Punjabi or Delhi baraat, non-negotiable and rightly so. South Indian ceremonies lean toward white or off-white with gold zari borders, quiet and luminous rather than loud. And then there is the groom's own generation, which has fallen hard for the pastel wave: powder pink, pistachio, champagne, soft grey, worn with a confidence their fathers never had access to. My job is rarely to pick one of these and discard the rest. It is to sequence them so each look earns its moment.
The Aesthetic: Ceremony Dictates, Personality Edits
I start every multi-tradition brief by mapping the ceremonies against family expectation, not personal preference, because that is where the real constraints live. The baraat or the muhurtham is not the place to experiment. If his mother wants maroon zardozi for the pheras, we give her maroon zardozi, but we control the silhouette so it still looks like him: a straighter cut, a raw silk instead of a glossy brocade, buttons in an antique gold rather than the bright polished kind. Small decisions, invisible to most guests, deeply felt by the man wearing it.
Where I let personality lead is the reception and the smaller, family-only functions. This is where a bandhgala earns its keep. The jacket is having a genuine moment this year, sharper tailoring, lighter fabric, minimal embellishment, and it photographs beautifully next to a bride in a heavier lehenga because it does not compete with her. I have been putting my grooms in luxe wool blends and textured silks in monochrome or tone-on-tone, sometimes with an embossed pattern in midnight blue or emerald that only shows in the right light. It reads modern without reading rebellious, which matters when half the room is aunts and uncles.
The Stylist's Touch: Building a Wardrobe, Not a Single Outfit
The mistake I see most often, even from grooms who are genuinely stylish, is treating each function as its own isolated decision. A wedding week is a wardrobe, and wardrobes need rhythm. I plan colour and fabric weight the way you would plan a tasting menu: nothing repeats in the same register twice in a row. If the mehendi look is a light kurta in sage linen, the sangeet cannot also lean soft and pastel, it needs contrast, maybe a structured Indo-western jacket in a deeper tone that photographs well under evening light. By the time we reach the baraat, the maroon feels earned rather than sudden, because the week has been building toward that intensity.
Fabric does a lot of quiet work here too. Velvet has properly reclaimed its place for the cooler months, and I am steering winter grooms toward lightweight velvet blends rather than the heavy, hot versions their fathers wore, so the drama stays without the discomfort. For anything happening in the lingering monsoon humidity we are still in right now, raw silk and cotton blends carry the same formality with far less weight on the body. A groom should never look like he is enduring his own outfit.
For the South Indian ceremony specifically, I resist the urge to modernise too much. The white and gold combination is already striking in its restraint, and the temptation to add embroidery or colour usually dilutes it. A crisp veshti or a gold-bordered kurta set, styled with the right jewellery (a simple gold chain, nothing competing with the bride's temple jewellery), does more with less than almost any other look in the week.
A Few Practical Notes I Give Every Groom Navigating This
Have the difficult conversation with both families early, before any fabric is sourced, so nobody feels overruled at the fitting stage.
Let ceremonial functions honour tradition fully; save personal style for the reception, sangeet, or after-party.
Choose one thread, a colour, a motif, a fabric family, that appears in some form across every look, so the week feels like a single story rather than four unrelated outfits.
Match jewellery and accessories to the formality of each function rather than repeating the same brooch or mala throughout.
Get every outfit fitted separately even if they arrive close together in the wedding calendar, since travel, food, and sheer exhaustion change how a body sits in cloth by day four.
If two ceremonies are visually similar, differentiate through footwear or headwear (a safa for one, mojaris alone for the other) rather than reworking the whole outfit.
What I love about this kind of brief is that it is never really about compromise in the deflating sense of the word. It is about translation, taking what two families and one man each need to feel proud and finding the version of a wardrobe that honours all of it without asking anyone to disappear into someone else's vision. That, to me, is the actual job of a stylist: not imposing a single aesthetic, but building a bridge sturdy enough for everyone to walk across it together.
If you are a groom, or you love one, standing at the start of a wedding week that needs to speak more than one language, I would love to help you build that bridge. Come talk to me before the first fabric is cut, and we will make sure every single look in your week feels unmistakably like you, wherever in the country it is being worn.
With love and style,
Shreya Gupta Kedia
Founder, SGK Styles
