Planning your creative wedding

An excerpt from the most important lessons I learned planning my wedding.

It’s been a year since I got married, which also means it’s been a year since I brought my creative wedding vision to life. Yes, I treated my wedding as a creative project — an opportunity to become a different kind of artist (don’t roll your eyes!) It was the perfect blend of Ope Adedeji as a creator and a productivity junkie. The result was mostly bliss; we had fun and didn’t feel overwhelmed or like we had to perform. And we did all this with a limited budget. Two weeks ago, I published most of the lessons I learned from this process in an e-book available here.

In this edition of the newsletter, I share excerpts from the guide. If you’re a creator like me or you’re simply curious about planning big events, chances are you’ll find this useful or interesting. 

Why we were intentional about our wedding

First of all, I’m an artist, no one should expect any less. However, there’s more.

• Your wedding should reflect what you and your partner care about. You don’t want to remember it in a few years and realise your choices were generic, based on what was trending at the time or on tradition, as opposed to what you care about. Remember that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being unconventional if it means being you. 

• Intentionality means inviting only the people you know, love and care about. This means you’re more likely to have an intimate wedding where you can cater to each person and, most importantly, have fun with them. 

• An intentional wedding is a stressless wedding. Weddings are rarely perfect. All that matters is that you’re having a good time with your partner and guests. However, planning correctly for the things that matter to you will reduce the mishaps you experience. I’m obsessed with quality wedding photos; from my experience, it can be difficult to get great images in several different outfits (I had five!). So, I planned a first look shoot the day before the wedding, where I wore the outfits I had planned for my after-party. This reduced the pressure to take photos in all five outfits on the wedding day. Don’t ask me why I had five outfits in the first place 💀
  

• No room for regrets. I’ve heard couples say, ‘I wish I did this on my wedding day,’ or ‘I wish I could have my wedding again,’ because they neglected to prioritise something they cared about during their wedding planning process. I understand scenarios where you get ideas for something months or years after your wedding. That’s not the point here. The point here is knowing what you want at the moment and communicating it.
  
  We didn’t want to have regrets, so boycotting the norm allowed us to put all our cards on the table and communicate it to our planners and vendors.
  
  Not properly communicating a small detail in the design of my traditional wedding outfit almost ruined my mood a few weeks before the wedding. I had wanted the stripes on my aso-oke to be horizontal, precisely like my grandmother’s aso-oke from her wedding in the 1950s. I didn’t communicate with the tailor because I took it for granted that telling her I wanted an outfit inspired by my grandmother’s outfit was enough. Even when she sent a sketch of her design showing vertical stripes, I still assumed the stripes would be horizontal. When she sent a photo of the dress, I almost fainted. Although I eventually realised that I didn’t communicate what I wanted and that the vertical stripes made the most sense given the style. I could have spared myself the few hours of unhappiness if I had adequately communicated that minor detail and we had brainstormed on it together. 

• Intentionality influences your budget. When you decide you want a unique and memorable wedding that screams you and your partner's personality, you can cut costs in many ways or find better ways to allocate costs. For instance, you might want to rent a dress or tux instead of buying one since you’ll never wear them again and are not sentimental enough to consider passing the purchased clothes down to your kids (if you want any). You might discover that you don’t want gigantic centrepieces on the reception tables. You might even realise that a wedding ceremony is not for you — you just want to go to the registry, and chill with your friends afterwards because friendship is important to you. 

• Intentionality will guide you through the battles you choose to fight. It’s not uncommon for weddings to be seen as family affairs worldwide. In Nigeria, a family affair is fundamentally the only way. Most parents or relatives will not relate to your ultramodern, intimate wedding plans, especially if you have a unique position in the family (e.g. the first child, only son, first daughter, etc.). But as an adult, the recommendation is to fight for what you want and to stand your ground. It’s, after all, your big day. Still, there are instances where you might want to make compromises to accommodate your parents’ or in-laws' requests. You can only know what you’re willing to let go of if you’re intentional about your wedding plan. For example, my husband and I didn’t care about the reception menu, but our mothers did. So in exchange for having our way with other aspects of the wedding, we let them customise the menu according to their taste — tit for tat. 

How we were intentional about our wedding

The wedding theme

The first thing we decided on was the wedding theme. I did most of the work here, but I drew inspiration from our love life, especially from the early days. My husband gave me space to explore and prioritise my tastes, especially since I wanted to create a story-driven theme. I decided we would have a vintage wedding after looking closely at what we hold close. Here are five of those things to give you a sense of how I arrived at vintage.  

• Wine: We both like wine. It was one of the first things we bonded over. Wine experts say that as wine ages, its taste, aroma, and colour change. That it becomes stronger. We aspire to love like this: smooth, soft, and tender. 

• Colour: Our favourite colours are pink and blue. I decided to prioritise pink because of La Vie en Rose by Grace Jones, one of my favourite songs. It’s a literal and metaphorical description of our love and what we want from our lives together. It also helps that the original version by singer Édith Piaf was released in 1947. Broadly, good music survives the test of time, and we want our love to be just that. Which leads me to my next point.

• Music: The evening my husband officially asked me to be his girlfriend, we were in his home in Ikeja, listening to Somi’s tender voice. She sang her version of the song, ‘Love Nwantiti,’ as my husband popped the question. The song has stayed with us through the years. Like La Vie en Rose, it’s timeless.

• Fashion: Neither my husband nor I pay particular attention to fashion trends. We love comfortable fashion, and that has primarily dictated our style. A short anecdote: My grandmother lived with my family all my life. We were close, and we got even closer before she died. After she died in March 2012, I felt terrible that I hadn’t known her well enough. Relatives unearthed pictures I had never seen of her; she looked very regal in all of these pictures. The photograph from her wedding day in the 50s still leaves me speechless (see below). She looks stunning in a chantilly lace blouse, aso-oke wrapper and high gele. I discovered that she had been a tailor and had worked with the Singer Sewing Machine Company for years when she was younger. It made sense that she was fashion-conscious and that her style was still relevant several decades after. I decided to pay homage to her through my wedding dress. 

• Friendship: Remember that the most valuable antiques are dear old friends. From day one, our friends and family have been our biggest cheerleaders. We needed to show that we valued and trusted them.

Note that the wedding theme was only the foundation. Intentionality and creativity played out in several different ways, some of which I’ve included here.

How this theme played out 

The theme came through in several different ways: our clothing choices, dress code for guests, decoration, music, etc. 

The pre-wedding shoot

We had three looks with two different photographers for the pre-wedding shoot, all of which were vintage in different ways. See excerpts from two briefs for the two different shoots vs the outcomes.

The traditional wedding 

For the traditional wedding, we decided we would wear cotton aso-oke, and would sew it in the style of the 50s. We kindly asked our friends to follow this pattern by choosing outfits that felt more like the 50s than 2022. My wedding dress was similar to my grandmother’s wedding dress. It’s how I paid homage to her. 

Excerpt from the very simple brief shown to my traditional wedding stylist

Excerpt from the very simple brief shown to my traditional wedding stylist

My top is chantilly lace and my skirt and gele are aso-oke - style and fabric broadly inspired by my grandmother. Unfortunately, no one could tie my gele exactly like my grandmother’s. But it’s okay. I was happy with this too.

Simple iro and buba for my friends because nobody was wearing corset back then.

Excerpts from the straightforward brief sent to our close friends

The church wedding and reception

The church wedding was intimate and small. Although my parents’ church officiated the joining, we didn’t use a choir to avoid having people we didn’t know at the wedding. My sister and family friend were the ‘choristers’ for the day. My younger sister made my crochet dress. Friendship was a big part of the wedding theme, and so these choices were not random.

Wedding dress by 21 Wool Street

The After-party 

My favourite part of the wedding was the vintage after parté. I decided that I would flip the coin and do something non-Nigerian. I borrowed inspiration from literature and film: Great Gatsby and Marilyn Monroe. We gave our guests two prompts in our request for them to play dress-up: 1) dress as a character from a novel or film from the 20s to the 60s and 2) dress as a character from Great Gatsby. My friend, Precious Arinze, helped create a brief we shared with our guests. 

How you can be intentional with your wedding and other events

If you haven’t been thinking about life-changing events and documenting your thoughts and opinions on them for years, it might be hard to know what you want. People say a woman’s most important day is her wedding day, and I disagree. I also don’t subscribe to spending your childhood years fantasising about the wedding of your dreams. I advocate for knowing who you are — your likes, dislikes, passions, etc. — and knowing how these might influence all the big events in your life, including your wedding day. 

Although my taste has always been unconventional, initially, it was hard for me to decide what kind of wedding dress I wanted since I had never created a wedding plan. With the help of a few questions, I came up with my intentional wedding plan, which helped me create my intentional wedding dress.  

You’ll find some of those questions below. As a fun exercise, you and your partner can answer them together and share them with your planner. If you aren’t using a planner, I recommend documenting your responses in your wedding diary — or a simple Google Docs page — and using that to flesh out your wedding plan. (In a later part of this guide, I’ll share notes on the tools I used to plan my wedding, some of which you might find useful). I’ll also share some of our responses and how we made them happen below. 

Note that this is not an exhaustive list of questions. 

• What do you and your partner care most about?: You and your partner are different people. It’s not uncommon for you to have different priorities. Listen to each other and meet halfway. 

• What are a few things that must happen at your wedding? For my husband and me, timeliness was at the top of the list. It was important for everyone in the wedding party to be dressed and ready on time and for all the ceremonies to happen at the right time. 

• What would be a disaster if it happened at your wedding?

• What’s capable of making you cry (not joyful tears) at your wedding? 

• Apart from your partner, what are some things that’ll make you happiest at your wedding? 

• What do you want at your wedding but are willing to let go of? 

After answering all these questions, I suggest you run the ideas by your siblings and friends to get their suggestions and concerns. Your friends and siblings know you better than anyone else, and their responses will give you a rounded view of what’s realistic and what isn’t. 

Ideas on how to be intentional 

• The size of your wedding

• The theme for your wedding 

• The wedding venue 

• The destination for your wedding 

• The role your family and friends play  

• The music at your wedding 

• Capturing special moments 

• The clothes you’ll wear

• The clothes your guests will wear

If you found this useful, you can continue to read about planning your intentional wedding by purchasing my short ebook here. I planned most of the wedding using Notion, as usual. If you have any questions about wedding planning or expressing yourself in any form, feel free to reach out to me. I’ll be more than happy to have a conversation.

As usual, errors in the letter are my fault alone.

Till next time!