Adiba Khatun went on the road to Romford for the National Asian Wedding Show.
For its tenth, annual outing, last weekend the National Asian Wedding Show arrived at the City Pavilion in Romford.
The hall was buzzing with brides and grooms eager to choose from a range of services from make-up artists to a stall wholly dedicated to individually printed invitation cards.
Other lines of business featured at the event included catering, special seating for the bride and groom, and diet planning, i.e. how to ensure you can get into your wedding clothes without popping any buttons.
One of the exhibitors was make-up artist Jhy who reported that cost of South Asian weddings has been sky rocketing recently. It’s still the case that you get what you pay for, but even if you only want a ‘simple wedding’, what you’re expected to pay ‘just goes higher and higher and higher.’
£70 is the full price of a make-up session, but at the event many businesses were offering ‘exclusive’ discounts. Most welcome when a single bouquet of flowers can cost upwards of £70. South Asian decorating styles are certainly becoming more lavish – and more expensive accordingly.
One example of expenditure becoming more extravagant is the extended use of tiklis. The manager of Sky Cakes explained that the tikli started out as a single bejewelled headpiece, but now ‘people have started decorating cakes with them.’
Affiliated with the East Shopping Centre in Green Street and BBC Asian Network, the National Asian Wedding Show has established itself as Europe’s biggest Asian bridal show. It gathers together all aspects of wedding rituals and puts them into a convenient package, including those aspects that you might never have heard of before!