There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with being a bride in India right now. It is not the pressure of the ceremony, or the family, or the occasion. It is the pressure of the name.
Whose lehenga are you wearing. Which house. Which season. As if the answer to that question is the answer to who you are.
I work in fashion. I have spent years understanding how desire is built, how names become signals, how the industry sells not just clothes but the idea of being seen in the right ones. And when it came to my own wedding, I found myself unable to participate in that system. Not out of rebellion. Simply because none of it felt like me.
So I went looking. Delhi, Punjab, all the places the industry points you towards. The work was often extraordinary. But I kept coming up against the same feeling, that I was being sold a story more than I was being shown the work. Almost every atelier I visited led with the language of craft, hand embroidered, fully worked, made to order. Beautiful words. But when I actually sat with the pieces, held them, tried them on, the reality was different. Most carried maybe thirty to forty percent handwork, the rest machine. Which at a certain price point is a reasonable exchange, I understand that businesses need to scale, that fabric, construction, a designer’s expertise and creative vision all factor into what you pay for. But when a lehenga crosses a certain number purely on the strength of a name, and the handwork tells a different story from the marketing, that gap started to feel important to me. Not as a criticism. Simply as a question worth asking. What are we actually paying for, and does the craft match the claim.
Somewhere along the way, the Indian bridal space has shifted from craft to currency. The label has gotten louder than the hand behind it. The karigar, the person who actually made the piece, has become a footnote.
I found Preeti Kler at 3 am through an Instagram ad. The next day I was at her studio in Delhi. And the moment I saw her work in real life, I just knew. Every piece I picked up, every dupatta I put on, you could see and feel that not a single stitch had been touched by machine. There is a kind of heaviness to fully handworked embroidery, a kind of irregularity, that you simply cannot fake once you know what you are looking for. Her pieces are steeply priced, and standing there in that studio, it made complete sense to me. Because she genuinely cares. Not about the idea of craft, not about the language of it, about the actual thing. She walked me through her workshop, introduced me to her karigars, and everything about it felt honest in a way I hadn’t felt anywhere else in the process.
Afterwards, we sat down, and that is when she told me she had never made a bridal lehenga in her entire career. Funnily enough, it didn’t scare me, it excited me, in a way that probably looked completely reckless from the outside. Because I finally knew, with complete certainty, exactly what kind of work my lehenga would carry. Fully handworked, nothing else. And there was a cheeky kind of excitement in knowing I wouldn’t be wearing something I was sold, I would be co-creating it, from scratch. I explained my entire vision to her: a fully hand embroidered lehenga with bareek zari work, finished with a border of her jaal zari, the work she is known for. She looked at me for a moment like I had lost the plot a little. In her words, she had never had a client this decisive and sure of what they wanted, let alone a bride.
At some point in that conversation she asked how I knew so much, whether I was a designer myself. I told her I work with one, and have worked closely with a few over the years. I could see it land, the pieces coming together for her, why someone walking in with no sketch and no mood board could still speak this fluently about embroidery and construction.
I paid her a deposit that day with nothing in hand, no sketch, no plan, no final number. She was upfront about that too, she said i genuinely don’t know what the final price will be because i have never done bridal in my twentyish year long career. So she took a small deposit and we just began. There was something about that I found completely refreshing. No performance, no pretence, just honesty.
She then introduced me to Afzal masterji, who has been with her since she was sixteen years old. He entered the room and aunty walked him through my vision. The more she explained, the more he gleamed, and I remember him saying “bohot khoob lagega” (it will look wodnerful). And then the work really began.
To understand what we were building, you need to understand the difference between zari and zardosi, two techniques that are often spoken about interchangeably but are actually very different things. Zari comes from the Persian words ‘zar’ meaning gold and ‘dozi’ meaning embroidery, so quite literally, gold embroidery. It is fine metallic thread worked flat into the fabric, delicate and precise. For my lehenga we used two shades, gold and antique gold, because I wanted the lehenga to age with me. Not feel new now and rustic later, but carry that patina from the very first wear, as if it had already lived a little before I even put it on. Zardosi takes zari and builds on it, combining the gold thread with beads, sequins and raised wires to create something that has dimension, that exists above the fabric rather than within it. Preeti aunty’s zardozi work is her signature, and it is what gave my lehenga its texture, that three-dimensionality that you notice when you’re close to it. Scattered through it were small green onyx beads too, not for the design alone, but because the stone is believed to bring growth, balance and prosperity, something Preeti aunty thought was a meaningful addition. All of it was done fully by hand by Afzal masterji and his team. Over the months, the lehenga slowly came to life.
Now I knew Preeti aunty had never done bridal before, nor stitched a blouse, and that is the one part where i actually got a bit nervous. A blouse has to fit properly, the neckline especially. Everything else has give. That doesn’t. Preeti aunty took it on herself, working out the pattern and the neckline from scratch. We went back and forth a few times before it sat right. Afzal masterji needed only two fittings to get it exactly right.
The fit wasn’t the only thing we had to account for. We always knew the lehenga itself was going to be heavy. Fully handworked embroidery carries weight in a way machine work simply does not, every bead and thread adds up. By the time it was done, my lehenga weighed close to twenty-three kilos. And yet, when I actually wore it, I could have danced in it for hours, twirled, jumped, and ran across that room if I wanted to. There was something freeing about carrying twenty-three kilos of craft and barely feeling it.
What stayed with me most though, wasn’t just the embroidery. It was something Preeti aunty insisted on that i hadn’t even thought to ask for. Where everyone else I had met through this process thought about the day, she thought about everything that comes after it. She wanted me to invest in something I would actually return to, style differently, wear again and again. Not something that would spend its life closeted. The dupatta she made me is something I can wear multiple times, style differently each time, pair with other things. The veil can be converted into a saree that I can wear with my wedding blouse. The industry today isn’t conditioned to think like this, it does not think about after. It thinks about the day, the photograph, the moment. But Preeti aunty thought about my life beyond it, about the woman I would still be wearing these pieces years from now. And I think that is what craft, real craft, actually is. Not just the hours in the making, but how deeply someone has thought about the person they are making it for, and the life that person will carry it into.
That weight, the months, the trust, all of it came together at the final trial in January. I looked at Preeti aunty and Afzal masterji’s faces before I looked at myself. The joy on them, the investment, the pride, said everything. At that moment it didn’t feel like my lehenga anymore. It felt like something all of us had built together.
On 16th February 2026, I wore it. And I didn’t feel like I had become a bride. I just felt like myself. Nothing performed, nothing signalled. Just me, in something that was made slowly, properly, with intention. Months from now on, when I think of myself as a bride, I will carry this feeling forever, not of how my lehenga made me feel on that one specific day, but of how it came to life. There is a certain kind of magic in saying yes to something all at once, in one moment, one day. But there is a different kind of magic in saying yes slowly, in parts, over months, watching something become itself as you become more sure. That is what this was.
The same instinct found its way into my sangeet outfit too, where a metal vendor my family has worked with for eight years took on a metal breastplate he had never attempted before, no design training, no fashion background, just genuine willingness to get it right, drawing after drawing until it finally sat the way it was meant to.
In an industry that has become very good at selling the idea of craft while quietly replacing it, I think that is worth talking about. The karigar is the story. The hand is the story. The label never was.
Credits:
Bride: Tanya Mansharamani Kapur, Groom: Arjun Amrit Kapur, Photographer: The Photo Lab, Wedding planner: Foreign Wedding Planners, Wedding Designer: Preeti Kler, Sangeet skirt – Diksha Tandon, Venue: Samode Hotels Mumbai
