Nepali – western weddings some inspiration

Planning a wedding that incorporates both your cultures on the most special day of your life is really difficult.

The culture, ceremony and traditions are completely different and of course the bride’s dress couldn’t be more different!

In Nepal, a bride wears red and in Australia, America, England etc, the bride wears white!

That’s why I thought I would give you some links to inspire any of you planning a fusion multicultural wedding to your Nepali partner.

It’s totally up to you if you want to choose one wedding ceremony that incorporates both Nepali style and ‘the white wedding’ (what I did) or have two weddings (many couples have one white wedding and one Nepali ‘red’ wedding) or only a white wedding or only  a Nepali wedding.

With our wedding, it was logistically hard to incorporate a full traditional Nepali wedding into our Australian marriage ceremony. We would have either had to have a second full day for the Nepali wedding (virtually a second wedding which was hard to do because of location, the need to light a fire for Nepali tradition and also with so many out of town guests who couldn’t attend for two days) or we could have done something in Nepal separately (which we still haven’t ruled out!)

So we did our best at a fusion Australian Nepali wedding.

We took tikka (blessing) from our elders, played Nepali songs at both the ceremony and the party, my bridesmaids wore saris and we had a separate photo shoot of me in Nepali wedding dress where my mother in law dressed me up in Nepali sari. It wasn’t a traditional Nepali wedding by any means.

Another big issue with the white wedding dress is that in Nepal, white is actually what is worn to funeral burials as it signifies death which is why I didn’t choose to wear white with red Nepali veil or anything. This makes it so hard to include red accessories on a white dress but some choose to do it anyway.

So here is some visual inspiration for a beautiful multicultural wedding.

What do you think? Which one is your favourite? Please share any links if you have any more

 How did you incorporate both your cultures on your wedding day?

Couple 1

English girl and Nepali boy, Sarah and Sudaman

This is an absolutely stunning wedding. Seriously how cute are they.

Photo credit: Camera Hannah and link to more photos at the Rock N Roll Bride website is here. 

Couple 2

Sarah and Amit’s second “white” wedding in Wanaka, New Zealand. Photo credit: Emily Adamson Photography. More pics here.

Hello, can you say stunning!

Then again Sarah and Amit’s first wedding (a Nepali wedding) in Wanaka, New Zealand. Photo credit: Emily Adamson Photography. A link to more photos of their wedding is here.

Couple 3

Cindy and Kris’ multicultural beach wedding

This couple decided to do one fusion wedding of both cultures, not two weddings like Sarah and Amit.

Photo credit: Michael Giragosian. More pics of their wedding at The offbeat Bride’s website here.

Couple 4

Videos: Clare (Australian girl) and Bish’s two weddings. The first is a Newari Nepali wedding in Nepal, watch it here and the second is their Australian wedding in Sydney, watch it here.