If you walked into Wedding Season costume designer Courtney Mitchell’s office while she was working on the film, you might’ve thought she was trying to solve some sort of puzzle. Or tracking a serial killer, maybe. 

“I looked like I was trying to solve a crime because I had to map out everyone’s looks,” the Toronto-based designer tells Tudum. What translates to screen is a colorful, opulent display of a beloved Indian tradition: weddings. 

The Desi Wedding Survival Guide with Suraj Sharma and Pallavi ShardaYou need to be prepared and committed for a long weekend.

Wedding Season stars Pallavi Sharda as Asha and Suraj Sharma as Ravi, two New Jersey thirtysomethings who pretend to date in order to relieve the pressure from their overbearing Indian parents during the spring-to-summer wedding circuit. 

According to Mitchell, she wanted the whole film to be a rainbow. So, she used a murder board-style map to craft each look. “I want you to really feel like you’re going to all these different dynamic weddings. And that’s what made this whole journey of them [spoiler alert] falling in love so interesting — to show their community is so robust and exciting.”

Below, Mitchell explains how she designed each look, where she sourced her saris and lehengas (aka traditional Indian wedding garb), and why star Pallavi Sharda was her North Star.

Paramount to that love story was the strong-willed, career-focused Asha — and the actor playing her. “Pallavi was my first source of information, so I started from her and worked my way out because that's very much how the script works. You really connect with her first,” Mitchell says. “Knowing that this is going to be an extremely colorful film, creating Asha's color palette was essential. That way, I could create a spider web of other palettes off of hers. There would be small things in Suraj’s wardrobe that also were a nice match or felt like color-coupling so people could know that maybe there’s a happy ending without anything being obvious.”

When it came to the color palette, Mitchell sought to mix the old with the new. “I use a lot of modern and acidic or vibrant colors that you wouldn’t necessarily see in terms of the jewel tones of a conventional sari. Where you might use gold, with her, I used silver. Or certain sari fabrics I would buy in a lime green, or lehengas in a hot pink or a purple or chartreuse. It was trying to show this very fashionable, New York point of view for both her contemporary clothes and then, also, for what you might traditionally wear to an Indian wedding.”

Although there are many elaborate traditional Indian garments, Asha and Ravi are also two modern millennials living in New York City and wear their fair share of Western clothing too. When they’re going to a barn wedding, “she’s going to wear a contemporary two-piece.”

Mitchell leaned on local Toronto designers like Mani Jassal for modern-feeling traditional garments. “She lent us three lehengas that are in the montages with Ravi, when they’re going to different weddings,” Mitchell says. “There's one that is hot pink, and it has this gold tinsel running through it that is really modern and exciting. I really wanted to incorporate young designers in this film, so, knowing that we were shooting in Toronto, I reached out to Mani Jassal and asked if they would be available for me to come to the showroom.”

Although Covid concerns meant that the film was shot during a lockdown, Mitchell tapped into the “amazing community in Little India in Toronto, on Gerrard Street,” that would let her search through their stores for inspiration. “We created these really strong relationships with the business owners and we would be let in on off-hours, and we started to have this incredible texting relationship where I could describe what I was looking for and they would immediately have 30 options for me to come in and see.”

The main concern for Mitchell was authenticity. “As a white designer, I had to be very careful with getting it all right,” she says. “Those relationships were essential in creating that mutual respect in having people trust me to be able to do it right.”

One of Asha’s looks is actually a jacket from Pallavi’s own closet that she wore to a fitting. Mitchell knew immediately that she'd want to fit it in the film: “When you meet an actor and you see something that's so well-suited to them, it’s helpful to include those on-screen because they’re just going to feel so at ease in them. So, when it was this moment of Asha’s confidence coming through and being her absolute truest self, I felt like we found our moment to use that. The colors in it are just so warm and inviting.”

Pallavi didn't get to have all the fun, though. Mitchell says she made sure to get “Suraj out of his comfort zone with certain things. I tried to put him in a little bit of a wider jean than he's used to. Him getting used to that was a funny dynamic, and I think he was really happy in the end with how everything fit. For menswear, it was about how to have all of these wedding looks and not just make it look like the same suit over and over. And how to make him look modern in the same way that I was doing it with Asha. A lot of that was buttoning his shirt all the way up and not having a tie.”

The most important factor in wearing a sari or a lehenga is making sure it fits immaculately. But when the brides were day players without speaking roles, sometimes that was a difficult task. “With some background, you don’t get fittings, so you have to plan ahead of time and be like, ‘OK, we are going to have this incredible beaded lehenga or this beautiful sari,’ and we might not see this person until the morning of,” Mitchell explains. “I was very lucky that the tailor on my show was a close friend of mine, so she was essentially with me wherever we went.”