Real Wedding · bangalore

Minole & Mir

Mukta Hall, Chamara Vajra, Bangalore

Minole and Mir met at Hampi, so their reception stage at Mukta Hall was built as a stepped well. They did not want a mandap either, so the lotus canopy was hung from the ceiling instead. Every one of the 7,400 flowers was stitched by hand from tailoring offcuts, old sarees and mill waste.

The brief opened with a refusal. Minole and Mir did not want a mandap, or at least not the four-pillar kind they had sat in front of at every wedding they had ever attended. What they got instead hangs. The lotus canopy over them is suspended from the ceiling of Mukta Hall with nothing holding it up from the floor, and they stood on a platform cut in the shape of a lotus. In the photographs there is no structure around the couple at all.

The reception stage came from Hampi, where the two of them met. We built it as a pushkarani, the stepped tank that sits beside the temples there, so the stage steps down towards the couple in tiers instead of rising behind them as a flat backdrop. Seven hundred and fifty guests worked that out at different speeds. A few recognised it on the way in; most were told during dinner.

Every panel in this wedding is stitched from fabric that already existed. Tailoring offcuts, old sarees, and mill waste, cut into squares and sewn into the patchwork you can see across the whole build. The flowers are fabric as well, and the filling inside each one is more fabric waste. There are 7,400 of them and every one was stitched by hand in our studio. Nothing about the scale was reduced to make the material work.

None of it went into a skip the next morning. The decor is in storage, folded and ready to be built again. That is the practical case for working this way, and it is a simpler one than most sustainability arguments: a flower stage is rubbish by 8am, and a stitched one is not.

The Wedding, in Frames

The Team

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