From Houston Public Media:
Karina Loren is quickly and carefully lacing up the front of her black satin corset, which fits snuggly over a sage green, Marie Antoinette-style gown with a plunging neckline. It’s her wedding dress, which she’ll wear to walk down the aisle in less than an hour. But it won’t be in a church.
On a horse-drawn carriage, she and her fiancé Adam Sanders are being escorted through the tree-canopied grounds of the Texas Renaissance Festival. Sanders is dressed in Steampunk clothing – which is sort of like a cross between the Victorian era and a sci-fi movie, complete with black leather vest, top hat and boots. It’s a bright Sunday morning and leading the way is a procession of knights, guardsmen, and various other people dressed in renaissance attire, while a bagpiper in a kilt plays Scotland the Brave.
More than five years ago, 33-year-old Loren and 29-year-old Sanders met through the online fantasy game, World of Warcraft, which has a similar theme to the Ren Fest. They saw the spot as a natural fit for their wedding.
“All the people that come to the festival are watching you and waving at you as you ride by,” says Travis Bryant, the festival’s marketing director. “And then you get to your venue and you can have trumpeters, a sword arch and all those romantic elements that you would imagine an English 16th-century wedding might carry with it.”
But even though they all have similar elements, every wedding is unique in its own way. Just ask Loren.
“We’re not big on the white wedding,” she says. “I’m not a girly girl. So we were like, ‘This is us.’”
It’s a trend people in the wedding industry are noticing more among Gen-Xers and Millennials.
“As the years have gone by, offbeat, alternative and non-traditional weddings have kind of become run-of-the-mill in a way,” says Catherine Clark, Senior Editor of Offbeat Bride, an online magazine all about unconventional weddings.
