NI · Est 2008
Shine Pics/ Notebook/ On having a themed wedding
The Planning Notes · Issue 07
On having a themed wedding.
A note on the difference between a theme that runs quietly through your day, and one that has exhausted itself by half-past five.
Most "themed weddings" I've photographed have not, in the end, been themed at all. They have been weddings with a colour, a season, a hint — something the couple cared about that I noticed only because they pointed it out at the rehearsal. The ones that announced themselves as themed in the morning were almost always exhausted by the speeches.
This is not a hostile view of themed weddings. I love them when they work. But I have spent a decade watching themes succeed and fail at roughly equal rates, and there is a difference between the two camps that's worth saying plainly.
01The good kind of theme
The themes that survive a full wedding day share a single quality: they are a thread, not a costume. They run gently through the day in small visible places — the colour of the napkins, a particular flower, a phrase, a song. Nobody at the wedding could give you a one-line description of the theme. They could only tell you the day felt very specifically yours.
The best themed wedding I ever photographed was a couple who both loved sea-swimming. Their theme was, technically, "the coast" — but you'd only have known if I told you. There were small white shells in the place settings. The ceremony reading was a Mary Oliver poem. The first dance was unhurried, the way swimming in cold water makes you feel afterwards. That was the entire theme. The photographs from that wedding are some of the quietest I've taken.
"The themes that survive are the ones you can't summarise. The themes that don't are the ones you can put on a hashtag."Diana Nesbitt · Shine Pics
02The kind that fades by 5pm
Themes that exhaust themselves share the opposite quality: they ask the day to do work for them. A Gatsby theme that needs everyone to bring 1920s headpieces, then forgets to do anything once they have. A "rustic" theme that's mostly hessian and mason jars in places where hessian and mason jars don't belong. A "Disney" theme that locks the couple into a tone they have to keep performing for ten hours.
It is not that any of these are bad. It is that they demand the day match the theme, rather than the theme quietly serving the day. By around five in the afternoon, the day stops cooperating. Headpieces come off. People sit down. The Mason jars have started to look like Mason jars again. The theme thins.
03What costumes do to photographs
This is the bit I have to be careful with, because I know couples love a dress-up wedding. Here is the truthful thing from a photographer's chair: costumes age oddly in photographs. The same photograph that feels playful in 2018 can read awkwardly in 2026. The dress, the suit, the rings — these go beautifully timeless. A flapper headband, a steampunk waistcoat, anything Disney — these become precisely datable to the year you wore them.
That isn't always a problem. Some couples genuinely want their photographs to date — to be unmistakably their day, their season, their year. If that's you, ignore me. But if you imagine these photographs hanging on a wall in twenty years, the dress will still look like the dress. The costume will look like 2018.
04The palette is the theme
If I had to pick the one thing that does the most theming-work for the least cost, it would be the colour palette. Three to four colours, repeated quietly across the flowers, the linens, the bridesmaids' dresses and one detail of the groomsmen's outfits, will hold the day together more than anything else.
This is doing the same job a wedding theme is supposed to do — making the day feel coherent — but it doesn't ask anyone to perform. Guests don't have to dress for it. The venue doesn't have to be transformed. The photographs hold together because the eye sees a palette, not because the props are doing the work.
If the theme needs a sign at the entrance, it isn't the theme.
The theme is whatever you don't have to explain. If your wedding needs a board at the door announcing the aesthetic, the aesthetic isn't doing the work yet. Move the energy into the palette, the music, the small details. Take the sign down.
…what I'd actually do
If it were me, I would choose one thing. Not a theme. A single, specific, slightly personal element that gets repeated three or four times across the day. A flower the two of you picked on a holiday once. A phrase you both use. A colour neither of your mothers would have chosen. Something you can point at, at six in the evening, and say that.
One detail, returned to. That is enough. That is, in fact, the most you can ask a theme to do.
If you're working out whether your idea is a thread or a costume, the contact form is the simplest way to talk it through — sometimes a third pair of eyes from someone who's seen a lot of themes succeed and fail is the most useful thing. Your wedding, your way is the broader version of the same idea.
