What to wear as mother of the bride or groom

The single most useful thing you can do is ask. Every family has its own conventions about colour, about how dressed-up each event should be, and about who is coordinating with whom — and no guide can tell you what your family has decided.

Ask the bride or groom what they are picturing for you, and ask the other mother what she is planning. Sometimes the answer is “we have always done this in emerald”; sometimes it is “wear whatever makes you comfortable”. Both are useful, and finding out two months out is much easier than finding out on the day.

A wedding in this community is rarely one event. Mother-of-the-bride outfits go wrong most often because the whole day is planned as if it were a single photograph: formal weight, heavy embroidery and a tight fit from the mehndi onwards. Plan each function for what it is.

Rich, saturated colour photographs well and holds up through a long day. Deep greens, wines, maroons and golds also hide the creases that a pale, flat fabric shows after three hours of sitting. Ivory and very pale shades are harder to carry in evening light and can read as a second bridal outfit in photographs, which is rarely the goal.

Weight matters more than fabric name. A heavily embroidered silk is a spectacular thing to stand in for an hour and a tiring thing to wear for ten. If the ceremony is long, the venue is warm, or the day includes a lot of standing, a lighter fabric — georgette or chiffon, for example — will look just as formal and leave you with more energy.

And think about what is near your face: the neckline, the dupatta or pallu, and the amount of embroidery at the shoulder. That is what appears in close photographs all day, and it is the part that decides whether you look like yourself.

The mother of the bride is usually one of the first people in the room and one of the last to sit down. Plan for that.

• Get the blouse fitted properly. An ill-fitting blouse is the reason most mothers of the bride end up re-pinning themselves all evening. It is a small alteration and worth doing first.
• Pin the pallu or dupatta at the shoulder seam of the blouse, not through the saree alone. A loose drape is the second most common source of all-day fiddling.
• Choose jewellery you can wear for the whole day. Very heavy earrings are wonderful for photographs and painful by the reception.
• Take flat or low shoes for the parts nobody photographs, and keep the good ones for the photographs. Standing in high heels from the mehndi to the reception is its own endurance event.
• A shawl or pashmina is not just for cold churches — it is also what you want over a saree when the evening turns, and it photographs beautifully.
• Eat breakfast. It sounds trivial and it is not.

Wedding season is the busiest time of the year in the shop, and the closer the date gets, the less room there is for a second fitting. Buy earlier than feels necessary, and have the fit checked properly rather than trusting that it will be fine.

Bring the shoes and the underwear you will wear with the outfit when you come to be measured, because both change the length and the line. Bring the jewellery too, if you can — a neckline that disappears under a necklace is easier to adjust in front of a mirror at the shop than on the morning of the wedding.

The shop does that work in-house: alterations are quoted per garment before anything is cut, and if nothing off the rail is quite right, made to measure is the other route. If you are dressing the whole family, mention that when you come in — matching looks are easier to plan together than one at a time.

A good saree you already own with a newly stitched blouse is a completely legitimate mother-of-the-bride outfit, and often the most comfortable one, because you already know how it behaves. Most of the time the improvement is not a new outfit at all — it is a blouse that fits, a pallu pinned where it belongs and a hem at the right length.

If you are thinking of reworking a piece, bring it in and we will tell you honestly what is possible. The guide on what alterations can and cannot do explains that properly, but the short version is: hems, blouses and waists are straightforward; changing the shape or structure of a heavily embroidered piece is not.