Your wedding suit gets photographed more than anything else you'll ever own, and those photos get looked at for the next forty years. That's the whole case for having it made properly instead of buying something off a rail three weeks out. This guide walks through the decisions in the order we actually make them at the shop: suit or sherwani, then cloth, then colour, then cut, then the calendar. We've been dressing grooms in Adyar since 1997, so most of what follows comes from watching what works on the day and what people wish they'd done differently.
First question: suit or sherwani?
Everything else follows from this one. Are you dressing Indian or Western on the main day? It isn't only a look. It's about the ceremony you're actually having, what your family expects to see, and what you feel like yourself in. If the wedding has a traditional Hindu ceremony with a muhurtham and a mandap, the sherwani, achkan or Jodhpuri suit sits more naturally. For a church wedding, a registrar ceremony, or a destination wedding run in Western format, a suit needs no defending.
Plenty of grooms now do both across the weekend: sherwani for the ceremony, a bandhgala or Jodhpuri suit for the reception, a clean suit for the welcome dinner. You get to be both people, which is honest, because most of us are. We can plan all of it in one sitting at the shop, with the cloths, the colour family and the finishing decided together so the outfits look like they belong to the same wedding.
Choosing cloth for Chennai, not for a lookbook
Three things decide the cloth: when and where the wedding is, how formal it has to be, and how it behaves on camera. Season and venue set the weight. A December wedding up north can carry a mid-weight worsted. A May muhurtham in Chennai can't, and wanting it to won't change that. Formality sets the fibre: fine worsted wool for the dressiest suits, linen-wool or fresco for anything outdoors and warm. Camera behaviour is the bit grooms forget. Flat, cheap solids go dead in photographs. A faint chalk stripe, a fine herringbone or a good deep plain keeps some life in the cloth.
For weddings here between March and November we push clients towards lightweight cloth nearly every time: a tropical worsted in 130s or 150s count, a linen-wool blend, or a silk-wool. You stay wearable through a long day in the heat and the suit still reads as structured in the photos. December and January are kinder, and a 120s mid-weight worsted is comfortable through both. If you are not sure which side of that line your date falls on, bring us the muhurtham time along with the venue. A six in the morning ceremony and a seven in the evening reception are two different climates in the same city.
Colour: pick something you'll still like in 2040
Your colour sets the tone for every frame the photographer shoots, and those pictures hang around for decades. The honest test is whether you'll still be happy with it at your own daughter's wedding. That rules out anything very of-the-moment, the shade that looks sharp this season and dated by the time the album is printed.
The colours that keep working are charcoal, navy, ivory, champagne and a good warm grey. Charcoal and navy are formal in the best sense and sit well against almost any lehenga or Kanjivaram in the group shots. Ivory and champagne are warmer and suit outdoor, resort and destination weddings. Medium grey is the most flexible of the lot, neither as hard as charcoal nor as bright as ivory.
We keep wedding-season swatch books at the shop and we'll tell you straight how a colour will read against your venue, your decor and your partner's outfit. That five-minute conversation is exactly what gets skipped when a suit is bought off a rail, and it shows up later in the photographs.