Amy Jain and Pratik Patel’s Three Day Wedding

By Allison Hatfield

“The timing was quite fortuitous,” Amy Jain says. The 31-year-old co-founder of BaubleBar, a brand that sells the latest trends in fashion jewelry, is talking about meeting her husband. She and Pratik Patel met in Dallas at a wedding on Easter weekend in 2010. Three years later, they themselves tied the knot.

When they met, Amy was living in Boston, going to business school, but planning a move to New York City. Pratik, who is from St. Joseph, Missouri, was already living in NYC, working in commercial real estate private equity. The two would have dinner and hang out when she would go into the city for work or to look for an apartment, and by the time her move was final, they were dating seriously. Today they have an apartment together in NYC’s West Village.

Amy grew up in Plano, and knew she wanted to get married here. She loves The Ritz-Carlton and the restaurant Fearing’s. Holding her three-day event at the hotel allowed all of her guests to easily be together. “When we thought about the weekend, we wanted our friends and family to feel like they were at home,” she says. “Our hope was that our friends would become close.”

The couple, both of whom are Indian, also knew they wanted to incorporate Indian culture and wedding traditions into their events, “but also find ways to infuse them with our personalities,” Amy says, “which have a lot of New York to them and a lot of Southernness to them.” Pratik and Amy are also vibrant, fun-loving people—and they wanted their wedding weekend to reflect that quality.

Guests began arriving on Wednesday, and wedding activities started Thursday morning with the bride’s religious ceremony, or puja, at the Jain house in Plano. The groom’s religious ceremony, or pithi, took place Friday morning at The Ritz. For the sangeet, a festival of color and an evening of music and dancing on Friday night, guests dressed in traditional Indian outfits—men in kurtas and ladies in saris. Amy provided her female guests a station to get bindis on their foreheads and arms full of brightly colored bangles.

The wedding was Saturday at noon. The groom’s procession—a singing, dancing, drumming parade called the baraat—preceded the ceremony, where 300 guests filled a ballroom and Amy, Pratik, and their families partook in traditional Indian wedding rituals. Lunch was a feast of Fearing’s classics: tortilla soup, tamale tarts, street tacos, and Mexican churros.

For many guests, napping consumed the afternoon, before the reception—more food, more dancing, more joyful laughter—began at 7 p.m., when the bride and groom traded traditional garb for a sharp new tux from Paul Smith and a smashing burgundy Vera Wang mermaid gown.

"When we thought about the weekend, we wanted our friends and family to feel like they were at home,” she says. “Our hope was that our friends would become close."