New Vancouver fashion show attracts South Asian brides

A once-in-a-lifetime experience for a bride requires a one-of-a-kind dress, and some of these dresses were on display Saturday in Canada's western coastal city of Vancouver at the first-ever South Asian Bridal Fashion Week.

The three-day fashion show and expo, including more than 20 top international designers, has attracted hundreds of local brides from Vancouver's large South Asian community. They're here looking for unique bridal gowns from many top designers, including several from India.

Jai Singh, Bridal Week organizer, told Xinhua on Saturday that a bride nowadays wants everything, because they are more exposed, and know the Western trends as well as the Indian and Chinese trends. So a bride now wants everything in one garment.

South Asian weddings are famously known as massive events. Even in Canada, they can often last several days, involving hundreds -- if not thousands -- of guests.

One local bridal gown-seller, Jas Chauhan, told Xinhua that such events and brides demand a customized dress that won't be replicated or even seen elsewhere.

"You want to be that one of a kind bride. You don't want to be that bride that you know, you walk into a reception five years down the road, maybe a couple months down the road, and you see another bride that has a very similar outfit," Chauhan said.

However, making a South Asian bridal gown is no easy task, said one bridal gown designer, Tina Bhardwaj, who is visiting Vancouver from New Delhi in India. They often require a small army of highly-skilled dress-makers and a lot of patience.

"Everything that you see here is done by hand so it takes much longer than most of the other outfits. So it's hand embroidery on a cart, and there are about six to eight people working on it, and it could go on for two weeks, it could go on for three, it could even take a month, sometimes a month and a half," Bhardwaj said.

And when it comes to the right one-of-a-kind bridal gown, there's really no limit to how much money one can spend, as a unique dress tends to have a unique price.

"So it could be anywhere between like 4,000 to 8,000 CAD (3,080 to 6,160 U.S. dollars), and the sky is the limit," said Bhardwaj. But still these gowns are sold well. Endi