When Tarisha Tholia was in sixth grade, some of her friends printed a fake wedding invitation with her name and Prerit Kothari’s on it, then delivered it to his house. Tholia and Kothari, then around 12 and 13, laughed it off. Neither suspected the school prank would eventually become family lore.
They grew up in Jaipur and attended the same school, though both say that they weren’t particularly close. Graduation took them on their separate paths, with Kothari moving to the United States to study at the University of Pennsylvania before joining McKinsey & Company in New York; Tholia remained in Jaipur and established her eponymous fashion label.
In 2021, they began speaking every day. After Kothari moved back to Jaipur from New York, he asked Tholia out one Saturday night. She was so caught off guard that she laughed. He became the first person she dated and, a little over three years later, the person she married.
Kothari wanted to propose outside Jaipur, but Tholia’s parents were not comfortable with the couple travelling alone together at the time. When she planned a trip to Dubai with her mother for an exhibition, he joined them under the pretext of helping with the event. He spent two and a half months arranging a private dinner at Atlantis The Royal and secured her parents’ blessing before the trip. “It wasn’t until I turned around and saw him on one knee holding a ring that everything suddenly made sense,” says Tholia.
Both came from large families, and neither wanted to celebrate without the people closest to them. A wedding in Jaipur also introduced nearly 200 international guests to the city where the couple grew up. They selected a private heritage venue for the mehendi, Jaigarh Fort for the wedding and Kothari Garh, the groom’s family property, for the sangeet. Each day held one major event, leaving guests time to explore Jaipur and recover between celebrations.
The couple also reversed the customary order by scheduling the sangeet after the pheras. “We both love celebrating and didn’t want to spend the entire night worrying about waking up early for the pheras the next morning,” they say.
As founder and creative director of Tarisha Tholia, the bride had always imagined dressing the people closest to her when she married. In under six months, she designed and produced more than 40 bespoke looks for herself, Kothari and their closest family and friends. The production schedule ran alongside the wedding planning, with fittings arranged around venue visits and guest-list planning.
The wedding in Jaipur began with a mehendi in terracotta, beige and brown, departing from the brighter colours usually associated with the ceremony. Live music continued through the afternoon as the two families met before the larger events.
For her mehendi, Tholia turned to Kashmiri embroidery, designing a yellow tissue sharara worked with dori and hand-sewn sequins, alongside a lavender waistcoat-style blouse covered in the same threadwork. The most personal element was an antique real-zari border found in one of her mother’s old boxes, which she incorporated into a dupatta detailed with cutwork, organza flowers and turquoise thread tassels. Her jewellery from The Jewel Works, Mumbai, included a diamond-and-emerald necklace with matching ear cuffs. For her husband-to-be, she designed a mustard raw-silk kurta and a front-open shaneel jacket with Kashmiri embroidery.
