You’ve asked and we’ve answered! Welcome to your weekly column ‘Planning Your Happily Ever After’ with wedding consultant Shikima Hinds.

It’s hard to believe that the new year is already upon us, and 2022 wedding planning is therefore in full swing!

Every year, I have a lot of fun sharing the emerging wedding trends for the upcoming year.

The biggest wedding direction for 2022 is not a colour, décor, bridal style or unique entertainment — on the top of the list of the biggest 2022 wedding trends is simply embracing your persona!

Trends may come and go but staying true to yourself will never go out of style, but a couple’s personal authenticity is taking the lead for 2022.

After a year with the wedding industry primarily on pause, weddings have never been more focused on the personality, the style and the story of the wedding couple.

With the easing of COVID-19 restrictions allowing for larger weddings, these celebrations are beginning to look more and more like they did pre-COVID. But has much changed? Weddings may have once been steeped in tradition, custom, and a long list of expectations (and in some ways, they still are), but couples are now considering what they truly want and how to best express themselves through their wedding.

In past years couples would have peppered a few fun, personal touches throughout the day. For 2022, couples are looking to create a day that’s highly personal, creative, and fun, featuring unique, unexpected elements to wow their guests and live on in their memory. The traditional wedding rule book has gone and couples are going ahead with doing whatever they want.

Some examples include:

• A menu planned around a couple’s favourite foods, regardless of the type.

• Crafting entire wedding menus around their love story.

• Involving their besties in the bridal party, even if it means having mismatched numbers on each side.

• The bride can wear whatever makes her feel most comfortable on her wedding day, be it a gown, jumpsuit, mini or sexy silhouette.

• Couples are more keenly aware of how precious shared time with family members and friends are and will ensure their weddings to be a celebration of this.

• The creation of a whole weekend of events that are mini festival-like.

• Everything being open for interpretation.

After almost two years of restrictions, engaged couples are looking forward to 2022 with renewed excitement where they can once again dream of a big celebration that reflects them and their love story. Be ready for levelled-up individualised experiences.

In 2022, weddings will celebrate all the things denied during COVID and kick off the future with joyful enthusiasm through the emergence of thoughtful and unique personal touches as couples break free from the traditional expectations of weddings to create something truly unique. Couples will feel much freer to throw out a lot of the traditional wedding ‘rules’ and start from the wedding elements what allow them to incorporate the things that are really meaningful to them.