When Did South Asian Weddings Become ‘Content’?
Couples are now spending thousands on phone-first creators to produce trending reels and TikToks — in the latest race to go viral.
Khushi Jain, a lifestyle creator, knew she just had to turn her destination wedding in India into content. But she didn’t want to make all the reels herself, so she hit on a better idea: why not hire a team to do it instead? “I had an Excel sheet of every reel, trend, and transition,” Jain told The Juggernaut. Her dedicated list mapped out everything from outfit reveals and behind-the-scenes clips to choreographed dance entrances and lip-syncs. Obviously, it had to be perfect.
From Monsoon Wedding to Humsafar, South Asian movies and TV shows are often incomplete without that big fat wedding. We’re obsessed with them, whether on-screen or off. Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh’s 2018 wedding video has over 11 million views on YouTube. Kiara Advani and Sidharth Malhotra’s wedding video racked up over 76 million views on Instagram. Mahira Khan’s 2023 wedding photos garnered over 1.9 million likes on Instagram. But something has shifted in the last couple of years. Pixel-perfect wedding photos and videos have ceded ground to made-for-social reels and TikToks, replete with shot lists, trending audio, and a creator hovering near the altar with a phone. Enter the new must-have wedding expense: a wedding content creator. So how did we get here?