It’s not a phase… Dark Weddings are not a fashion trend - they’re here to stay!

Styled Shoot

20 Sept

In 2022, a group of alternative wedding suppliers gathered inside a deconsecrated church in Leeds to create a dark celestial wedding shoot. Four years later, we can see it was about more than moons and stars.

The alternative wedding world has grown enormously since these images were taken. New suppliers have appeared. New events and communities have been created. The breadth of what an alternative wedding can look like has expanded, and, somewhere along the way, two independent wedding collectives eventually found their paths converging to become Dark Wedding Collective.

But none of that existed when we walked into Left Bank Leeds to create It’s Not a Phase… this was the first styled shoot by TilDeath Alternative Wedding Collective to promote the first full Gothic Luxe wedding fair. And looking at it now, we can see some of the foundations we’re still building on today.

It’s Not a Phase

In 2022, we began planning the first dedicated TilDeath wedding fair, and It’s Not a Phase was the shoot we created to introduce it to the world. The setting was Left Bank Leeds, a spectacular deconsecrated church that now exists as an arts, events and community space.

For the shoot, we chose a dark celestial theme. Partly because celestial styling is wonderfully evergreen. Moons wax and wane, trends circle and return, and there is something timeless about looking to the night sky for symbolism. But the name had another meaning.

Alternative people have been hearing some variation of “you'll grow out of it” for generations.

The music. The clothes. The tattoos. The dark lipstick. The strange interests. The things that make us feel most at home in ourselves are frequently treated as something we'll eventually leave behind.

Then people get engaged and, suddenly, there can be another expectation waiting for them: perhaps now they'll want a proper wedding.

It’s Not a Phase was our answer to both.

Dark doesn’t have to mean black

Looking at these photographs four years later, one of the things that strikes us most is how the visual language of alternative weddings has evolved.

This was unmistakably an alternative wedding shoot in 2022 - and yet there's remarkably little black outside the clothing. Instead, the darkness comes through midnight and inky blues, metallic gold, candlelight and celestial details.

Crescent moons sit amongst deep blue place settings scattered with tiny golden stars. Galaxy-inspired stationery carries the night sky across the tables. Moons and constellations appear through the styling, headpieces, cake and signage, while textural florals and horned skulls keep the celestial theme grounded in something darker and more visceral.

All of it sits beneath the soaring architecture of a former church.

More than an aesthetic

That was important to TilDeath from the beginning. We didn't simply want to put unusual wedding products together and call the result alternative. We wanted wedding suppliers who didn't just want to work on darker weddings, but understood the cultures, interests and references behind them.

That distinction mattered, because when somebody understands your world, you don't have to spend half the conversation explaining it before you can start creating.

And that was happening amongst the suppliers on the shoot too. While our celestial wedding gradually took shape around us, conversations wandered into music, gigs and festivals. People realised they'd seen the same bands or been standing in the same festival fields years earlier without ever knowing one another.

We'd set out to help alternative couples find their suppliers. We were beginning to realise that alternative suppliers needed spaces to find one another too.

The foundations we grew from

Looking back at It’s Not a Phase now, it's easy to see the aesthetic evolution.

Our individual businesses have changed. The alternative wedding industry has changed. Even the visual language we use to describe a gothic or alternative wedding has changed. But the more important things are remarkably familiar.

We wanted alternative couples to be able to see themselves in wedding inspiration without waiting until somebody decided it was spooky season.

We wanted brilliant suppliers to have visibility that actually represented their work.

We wanted people to be able to find wedding professionals who understood their references rather than asking them to dilute their ideas.

And we discovered how much happens when creative people who share those worlds are simply given opportunities to find each other.

At the time, we thought we were promoting a wedding fair. Looking back, we can see we were building a community. Not perfectly. Not according to some grand plan. And certainly not with any idea of where it would eventually lead.

It was never a phase

We couldn't see Dark Wedding Collective from where we were standing in Left Bank that day.

We didn't know where TilDeath would take us, who we'd meet along the way, or that elsewhere Dark Enchantment would begin building something from many of the same ideas.

We didn't know that one fair would lead to another, then a directory, subscription style boxes, bigger venues, different cities and eventually a collective larger than the one we'd started.

We just knew there were couples looking for something they couldn't find. We knew there were suppliers creating extraordinary work that wasn't always being seen. And we knew there was room for something darker.