(Photo from Festival Facebook page)
A glamorous night, in a room full of lights, decorated with bright pure colours, the eyes of families and friends full of happiness and tears, hearts pounding with joy and love, with romantic music in the background and a light cold breeze. Here comes the bride in her white dress to catch all the breaths with her beauty and complete the ever-after princess fairytale.
This is every girl’s ideal dream wedding, but it takes plenty of effort and money to reach that night and complete all its intricate details.
In attempts to help every couple about to get married with their preparations, the largest White Wedding Festival took place last weekend.
The festival, which took place in the Dusit Thani Lake View Cairo hotel, aimed to provide everything any couple needs to organise their big occasion, from the wedding night to the honeymoon.
“The idea of a wedding festival is not new in Egypt, but the way we applied it is the first of its kind,” said Karim El-Bialy, owner of Fashion Republic, the organising company of the festival. “We aim to provide couples with everything related to weddings in one place”.
More than 35 exhibitions were present at the festival, featuring wedding invitations, photographers, videographers, light and music suppliers, entertainment forms for weddings, bridal dresses designers, dentistry, beauty salons, make-up artists, wedding planners, jewellery and cosmetics.
The festival also provided couples with ideas and tips never shown at a wedding festival before, like shows on the traditional Egyptian celebration, the “zaffa”, which takes place at the start of a wedding. In addition, significant discounts were given by exhibitors participating in the festival.
(Photo from Festival Facebook page)
“We had five different zaffa shows alongside the three bridal-dresses fashion shows signed with the name of famous designers from around the world,” El-Bialy added.
The festival further presented various firework shows that might be included in a wedding.
“We target upper-class customer, who can afford to have a glamorous wedding at a five star hotel,” El-Bialy continued.
Even though the invitations were for free, the company made sure to filter the attendees in a very long and complicated process to make sure that the people who attended are the ones who will benefit from the shows.
With over 1,500 attendees, including celebrities and public figures, most of them gave positive feedback about the organisation, describing it as meeting international standards.
“The cooperation we had with the hotel was a very helpful” said Ghader Khalid, the festival backstage director. “The open-air space it provided for the festival was spacious and helped us move freely to organise everything perfectly.”
The festival took three months to plan and a month and a half to organise in the field.
