Monica and Charl’s South African wedding was a fun mix of the 1950s, rockabilly and pin up. The bride has always been obsessed with the era and she idolised Marilyn Monroe, so it was like the perfect theme for them.
“I always wanted to look like Marilyn Monroe on my wedding day”, she explained. “I also love vintage cameras and radios so I thought it would be really cool to incorporate the vintage goods with the 1950s stars to give the feeling of going back in time.”
“When we started planning the wedding the one thing I kept repeating to myself was ‘I want to be different, stay true to who I am’. With this in mind, we tried to stay away from the everyday wedding trends. I feel that I accomplished this by having a ‘2-in-1’ dress. It was long for the ceremony but we changed the skirt for the reception to be a short, fifties style.”
“We used a lot of vintage props like vinyl records, old glass cold drink bottles and vintage electronics in the reception. We even went as far as to ask the DJ to play a lot more 1950 and 1960s music to create the rockabilly atmosphere. Our guests also dressed up! We asked them to come dressed in pin up/ rockabilly style. We were pleasantly surprised to see how many of them actually got it right!”
The bride rocked her pink hair, but she only decided to dye it the morning of the wedding! “My cousin arrived at my suite to do my hair and make up and she mentioned that she had some pink hair dye in her bag”, said Monica. “Before she could finish her sentence, I asked her to dye my hair pink! This was a very big surprise to Charl and all the guests as they didn’t even recognise me! ”
“The best part of the planning was shopping for all the vintage stuff together. We spent many weekends looking around in antique shops and coming up with cool ideas for the wedding. We would not have done anything differently. I really feel like all the late nights were worth it and everything was exactly how I wanted it.”
