Wedding Trends

From pastel colour schemes to puppy party bags, wedding themes and accessories are rigorously governed by fashions created online or on the runway.

But the half-life of wedding trends can be ridiculously short - just weeks after a hip new trend appears on wedding blogs or in the pages of bridal magazines, it can quickly lose favour and be seen as passé.

The internet is partly to blame; couples planning their nuptuals often end up obsessing over sites like Pinterest, which can act as a catalogue for wedding aesthetics and themes.

The Independent asked two wedding planners to give their honest views on the current wedding trends in Britain.

They revealed the five trends that have made their jobs more difficult over the last year, and urged engaged couples to consider dropping them.

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Rustic themes

Katie Hallam, co-founder of Lily and Sage luxury wedding planner, told The Independent: "We like to educate our brides to help infuse their own personal style and not just replicate what they see on Pinterest.

“We are literally at the end of our tether with the whole jam jar infused ‘rustic' style wedding theme - it’s been done and done so many times before and although it was a lovely idea a few years ago - it’s no longer original or unique.

"If I see one more burlap or sack cloth table arrangement or another barn style seating plan I might scream!"

“We don’t necessarily like to follow trends because we don’t want people to look back at their wedding photographs in years to come and think that they were just part of a particular craze!”

Robin Weil, chief executive of weddingplanner.co.uk says: “Many couples want a Pinterest-worthy wedding despite being on a tiny budget. It would be nice if couples worried less about what they saw there, and didn’t have those expectations to start with.”

Sparklers

A huge trend at the moment is for the bride and groom to make their exit at the end of the night to a backdrop of sparklers.

“They are all trying to capture the same Instagram moment, and it can actually be quite dangerous”, says Robin.

“Last summer our chief technology officer got married and his wife’s dress was accidentally set on fire by sparklers!”

Dancing entrances

“You want these events to be fool-proof. Something like that which can always go wrong is worrying”, says Robin.

“I’m a massive disbeliever in corny entrances into the room,” David Tutera of DT Studios told GQ.

“The wedding party comes in trying a horribly choreographed dance, pumping their fists in the air. It always looks like a bad frat party gone horrifically terrible.”

Brides being deliberately late

It has always been common for weddings to run behind schedule, but there has been an increasing trend in brides turning up late just for effect in the past year, according to Robin.

“Organisers hate brides being late. It’s always been a tradition and now it’s become a bit of a trend that they make grooms wait, but it can really put the rest of the day out of sync", he says.

Using friends and family as suppliers

Couples increasingly under pressure to tighten the belt have been getting friends to stand in as photographers, or relatives to perform the music for the first dance.

This is particularly tricky, according to Robin, because “it is difficult to complain if they’re not up to scratch, or if for example they are drunk. It’s nice to get friends and family involved but it often doesn’t work out.”