Shubhika Sharma’s Mumbai-based label Papa Don’t Preach by Shubhika does it all — bespoke wedding wear, flashy party clothes, shoes, jewelry. Her offerings are varied but the line’s vivacious spirit is the thorough-line, as seen in its many bright colors, intricate embellishments and Bold patterns. It’s a house style that demands all eyes, which is what makes it so ideal for brides on their big day. Sharma has designed for, in her words, “probably a zillion” of them since founding her brand in 2010. She holds a special spot in her heart for one particular project, however. It was a wedding season that Sharma designed for a client (November through February in India). Yes, for her sister’s nuptials, Sharma designed the entire wardrobe for the event.
Indian weddings can be a serious business. I have a general sense of the expenses and the fanfare associated with them, but Sharma, an expert, runs me through all the typical ceremonies and traditions practiced in the three-to-four-day-long festivities over coffee in midtown Manhattan. She’s in the area for an event showcasing her latest jewelry collaboration, following a speaking engagement she had at Harvard, and though it’s clear that she’s super busy I end up stealing about two hours of her time because there’s just that much ground to cover.
“It’s the only time in most peoples’ lives that they’re going to be like celebrities,” Sharma explains. “Especially in India, in the six months or one year run up to it, you are treated as royalty. I don’t think most people get that in their lives, so that is special. And I think that is why weddings also end up putting a lot of pressure on the brides.” Designing for family is an extra bit of pressure, of course. Sharma jokes that she had yet to successfully design for a family member, as her ornate garments hang too heavy for her mother’s liking.
As it happens, her sister (who requested her and the groom’s names be withheld to maintain privacy) proved to be a much more “chill” client than others. That said, it’s tough to fully avoid all the typical stressors working against women as they plan their big day. Designers will talk about the usual anxieties of dressing up and looking like a princess. However, this pressure can be magnified when there is less of an event and more of a parade. This is often the case for Indian couples. We are more intimate at smaller weddings than those over 250. “For us, the people we invite for weddings are like 1,000, 2,000, sometimes 10,000 for bigger weddings,” she says. “You’re literally standing on the stage and there are 10,000 people coming in. Two hundred and fifty for us is like a microscopic wedding.”
The cost of a wedding — something families save up their entire lives for — and the pressures on everyone to make the ceremony an absolutely flawless, cinematic production kind of wear Sharma down. For a designer who is heavily invested in bridal wear, she’s a little bit jaded about the whole marriage thing.
“I feel like I’m somebody who doesn’t really believe in marriage,” she says. “I live in a lot of contradictions and sort of find my way back to things. That is my design process, actually.”
Case in point: When Sharma’s sister got engaged and the time came to start chipping away at the behemoth stone that is planning an Indian wedding, Sharma shrugged off the idea of designing for her. “I told her to first go look at any other designers,” she recalls. “I literally made her do the rounds for two, three months. I sent her to other cities.” After searching high and low, it only became more clear that Sharma would have to be the mind behind her sister’s wedding looks. It was just a bit later than expected. In November, she officially started to create the many outfits for the January nuptials. (For reference, I’m planning my own July wedding and horrified the salespeople at several NYC bridal salons by shopping for my singular white dress a mere eight months prior.)
Sharma was looking to convey a sense of wonder and excitement by storyboarding her vision. The transformation took place over several days. She’d start out with a fresh, “girlier” vibe and build up the drama over several events/outfits to make sure the final look felt the most momentous. The bride agreed that the colors and silhouettes should change from being lighter and more playful to more majestic during the ceremony.
Sharma’s first outfit was designed for the Mehendi wedding. “There’s a lot of dancing, a lot of fun,” Sharma says of the Mehendi, a ritual in which henna is applied to the bride’s hands and feet. The groom’s name is hidden in the intricate designs. Her outfit was simple and comfortable. The ceremony is often held outside, and slightly more casual than the rest of the events — an occasion that called for flats instead of heels. This is why she designed a two-piece set. A butterfly top with cap sleeves, and flowy pants.
“The family kind of sits around, we play a lot of music. It’s usually the older women of the family,” Sharma explains. “We sing the songs, it’s a very fun session where you’re pulling the boy’s leg and kind of saying, ‘Oh my god, you’re so useless. You’re taking our princess!’ So that’s how the bride kind of starts getting ready for it.”
The pale pink top is the product of a couple weeks’ worth of dedicated focus, all hands on deck. “This takes about 15 days to just embroider,” Sharma says. “There are about 20 to 25 steps in making one garment when you’re doing hand embroidery. So overall, it takes about a month for one outfit to be fully ready, if you want to do it well.”
There’s a genuine reverence in Sharma’s voice when she discusses the importance of the artisans that bring her work to life. Her business is kept running by her Karigars. In India’s garment industry (as in many worldwide), they’re often underpaid, disrespected, and the first to be let go. But the designer recognizes how crucial the karigars’ talent is to the brand, so much so in fact that their names are printed on the labels of her clothing. Each piece informs the wearer of who to thank for the handiwork with “embroidered by:” and “tailored by:” credits. Sharma is concerned that their skills could be lost and plans to create a program that teaches math, language and the essential artisan craftwork. “It is an art that will die because they don’t want to put their kids in it, they say that there’s no dignity,” she says. “What they are asking for is basic. “So I would like to open a school that teaches them math and language, but also hand embroidery. This will allow them to be able to teach them tomorrow even if it is not their day. [think] ‘OK I don’t want to do hand embroidery [professionally],’ at least the skill has been taught.”
Artisanal handiwork was of the utmost importance for the bride’s Sangeet look. Sangeet is an event usually held a day or two before the wedding with both the bride and groom’s families and is characterized by singing and choreographed dances. Sharma sets the scene: “[Sangeet is] It’s like a dance competition. Usually you narrate the story of how the boy and the girl met through dance and music — as you know, Bollywood or Indian cinema is a lot of music and song and dance. It’s a very important form of communication for us; our films have, like, five or seven songs every film and it’s not even called a musical, it’s just a regular film!”
“Ornate” would be an understatement for the bride’s Sangeet look: an indigo two piece skirt set heavily adorned with gold jewels and aqua beading. A second skirt was essential to allow for the dance that the bride will perform at the ceremony.
“She wanted a very ‘red carpet’ moment,” Sharma says, describing the fitted, decadently adorned skirt for the less active part of the event. A shorter version of the skirt was made for the dance. It allowed her to move freely and gave her a clear view into the henna tapestries that were carefully applied at the Mehendi.
“We were looking at more Hollywood glam,” Sharma says of the vision for her sister’s Sangeet. “Because Sangeet is where you can do a whole cocktail look — but still has to be Indian, so we used a lot of gold on it.”
As elaborate as the bride’s Sangeet outfits were, the most time-consuming piece was actually the groom’s look. His baby blue jacket with silver embellishments complement the bride’s royal blue top and lehenga with gold detailing. Romantic that he is, the groom had his bride’s name embroidered into the piece. Until the wedding, Sharma wasn’t completely certain that her male clientele would be as interested in the kind of high-drama sequins, beading, and embroidery she favors for wedding looks. But her sister’s husband-to-be was all for it. “He was a really cool, brave one,” Sharma says. “He completely trusted me.” The looks turned out so wonderfully she was inspired to expand her line to include menswear offerings.
“This is the first time we launched menswear,” Sharma says. “We used to get a lot of requests, but I was like, ‘I don’t know if men would actually wear something so embroidered.’ But they were like, ‘Yes, we will!’”
She also designed the groom’s jacket for the Phera, the most major ceremony. It’s a ritual in the tradition of Hindu wedding ceremonies where the couple takes seven vows and walks circles around a fire to represent the seven promises they make to each other. The practice is seen as a sacred binding ritual, sealing the couple’s marriage.
Sharma and the groom created a Phera look together. Sharma wanted to capture the essence his partner in a dress. “She uses a really pretty pink flower next to her name on Instagram,” Sharma says. “And he was like, ‘For me, that’s her.’ He is so cheesy!” She translated his association into a floral motif for the jacket, beading pink blooms along the top of the shoulders and chest.
And while the piece is an absolute work of art, all eyes were on the bride as she made her dramatic entrance: “She actually recorded a song, so as she came down, she was singing!”
Sharma beams with pride when she speaks about her sister and her vision of the Phera look. “Her story is beautiful,” Sharma says lovingly. “So as you see, she’s bigger than [many] Indians are. She was so comfortable in her body and she was like, ‘Take my neckline lower. Make it look sexy. Make it nice.’ And to me, that’s very rare for Indians to do that.”
In Sharma’s experience, that level of confidence is not the standard for brides who aren’t slight and petite. She mentions that some of the practices around garment making for taller or curvier brides in India seem constructed to shame them for their bodies: “The reason I’m emphasizing that she’s not your typical size of a bride is because in India, there’s something called a fat tax; I don’t know if it’s a common term here,” Sharma explains. “A lot of the luxury brands or just like bridal brands charge a higher percentage on making bigger sized clothing because they say that’s like more embroidery more handwork, [etc]. Indian designers must take responsibility for their luxury label, I believe. This is what I mean by luxury. Last You can help a person by making the clothes fit them without charging. [extra].”
Sharma does not charge extra fees to her customers for causing pain. She doesn’t traffic in fat taxes; in fact, she doesn’t care much for size labels at all. In addition to featuring the names of her karigars, Papa Don’t Preach tags don’t print size labels. They simply read “SIZE: DOESN’T MATTER.”
The designer is comfortable with bulldozing norms that do not serve anyone. Like her sister, Phera brides wear all-gold or all-red for the ceremony. It’s so established that Sharma (who has made clothes for a zillion brides) rarely makes garments for the ceremony. “A lot of people wear me for the Mehendi because I’m very colorful,” she says. “So I will say that she is officially the first bride who’s worn me on all the events, even on the Phera.”
Her family hails originally from Punjabi and is from the north of India. Sharma thinks their cultural heritage might have made them more open-minded to trying new things.
“Up north, we are just so colorful, you walk down the roads and there’s color everywhere,” she says. “It’s in my blood. As [artist and activist] Alok Menon really beautifully puts it, Punjabis were the original drag queens of India.”
When Sharma says that she doesn’t totally buy the concept of marriage, it certainly seems like she’s telling the truth. Sharma is regaling me with stories of cultural traditions that bring people together and bring them together, so it appears she may still be a believer.
A perfect ceremony is one that stars someone you care about, in which the couple feels like they belong together. One for which so many have worked tirelessly, in which the bride and groom look like royalty on a day they will always remember with joy, can be enough to restore faith in the institution.
“In the run up to it, I was uncomfortable really,” Sharma admits. “But when I actually saw them together and I worked with both of them on the clothing, and I reconnected to a little bit of what it actually means to be true partners. And my jadedness kind of disappeared.”