When we ask newlyweds to think back on what they wanted most for their big day — and we’ve interviewed hundreds of them over the years — the most common response is “For it not to feel like a wedding!” The betrothed have never been less attached to the old wedding handbook — or the need to please their great-aunt. So in a flurry of pampas grass and perfectly mismatched-to-match bridesmaid dresses, how do you pull off a non-cookie-cutter affair? For the answers, we decided to interrogate the cool couples whose weddings we would actually want to steal, right down to the tiger-shaped cake toppers.
Here, we spoke with Los Angeles–based couple Negine Sekandari, who’s a filmmaker, screenwriter, photographer, and actress, and Ibrahim Mimou, who runs an automotive-supply distribution company. As the children of immigrants — the bride is of Afghan descent, while the groom is Syrian — they had to gently push back on family expectations of what a wedding would look like, opting to hold an intimate Islamic ceremony over a year before their bigger, more modern celebration in Hollywood. The push and pull of cultures was clear at their May 2024 nuptials, which was planned with the help of ChatGPT and used a color scheme from Georgia O’Keeffe but kicked off with a traditional Syrian entrance processional and loads of Arabic dance music.
Negine: I’ve photographed a lot of Afghan and similar cultural weddings and what I’d noticed is that they don’t feel like they’re for the bride or groom. The music is always so loud that people can’t talk. You’re expected to dance the whole time. It’s always Afghan food. And most of the time, the bride just sits on the stage and stares at the people having fun. That’s not what I wanted.
Ibrahim: I wanted good food. That’s probably the only thing I cared about. I didn’t want anyone not to like the food.
Negine: There’s definitely been a shift happening, and I’m seeing people from my generation have more modern weddings. I had to have so many conversations with my mom of, “No, I am not going to invite someone who I don’t know. I’m going to keep it really intimate.” There was a lot of fear, with people being like, “What do you mean it’s outdoors? What’s the food going to be like? What are people going to think?”
Ibrahim: We met when I reached out to her on Instagram.
Negine: He slid into my DMs. Modern romance!
Ibrahim: She’d done a photo shoot with some of my friends in London, and I followed her. When I saw she’d moved to L.A., I reached out to get a coffee.
Negine: I met him four days after I moved. I didn’t think of it as anything other than just making new friends in a new city. We were friends for a while.
Ibrahim: But I was attracted to her right away. I knew she was artistic, but she was funny, she was pretty. She was just easy to get along with.
Negine: What it is about Ibrahim is this deep respect he has for himself and everyone around him. It’s this confidence he carries. He’s just a pure, honest person who is so open with his heart, and I think that’s what made me fall in love with him and want to marry him.
Ibrahim: When we knew we were both ready to get married, we had to meet each other’s parents. Once they approved, I proposed to her at Griffith Observatory, right before sunset.
Negine: He was shaking. I remember thinking, This is so cute. In our cultures, you have to get Islamic-ly married in order to live together. So we had our Islamic marriage, the katb Al-Kitaab, a year in advance of our wedding. I still called him “fiancé,” because Muslim girls deserve to have a fiancé!
Ibrahim: We just had really close friends and family at Negine’s family’s house in Arizona. Basically you give a proclamation under oath to God that you have the intention to marry this person, and that is the Islamic engagement period. That was in March 2023, then we had the wedding in May 2024, which was more of a grand celebration. Some people will do the religious marriage and legal marriage on the same day, but it didn’t work out that way for us. I needed that year to save up for the wedding!
Negine: I really wanted a lush, outdoor wedding. I wanted to be able to cater our own food, not use the venue’s food.
Ibrahim: The biggest thing was we knew we didn’t want to do it in a banquet hall.
Negine: It was hard to find exactly what I was looking for, so I put everything I wanted into ChatGPT, and Lombardi House came up. It’s in the heart of Hollywood but really hidden on a pretty street.
Ibrahim: Once you step foot on the property, you don’t feel like you’re in Hollywood anymore. It’s fully surrounded by greenery. There’s a nice white cottage at the center of the property, with a wraparound yard, and there was a barn that we used for dancing.
Negine: I kept treating the wedding like a film. I felt like I was producing a movie. I wanted it to feel visually lively, and as I was looking through a Georgia O’Keeffe book, I saw this work of hers called Shell on Red and the colors were so vibrant. Our florist, Eve Neuhart, who’s also a really good friend of mine, found flowers and fruits in the same colors and really made the vision come to life. I wanted to have a lot of candles, and I sourced vintage silverware and trays at thrift stores around L.A.
Ibrahim: The morning of the wedding, we went out for coffee and a pastry together before she went off to get her hair and makeup done.
Negine: I just knew it would be such a crazy day, and I wanted to start it with him. My best friend, my cousin Marina, and I went to the studio of my hairstylist, Arbana Dollani, and my makeup artist, Gehna Chugani, came there too. It was very chill and slow and great. I loved my hair and makeup so much.
Ibrahim: I wore a Ralph Lauren tuxedo with a Turnbull & Asser tuxedo bib and Morjas opera shoes. I got a custom brooch made of a silver palm tree by this Italian jewelry house called Daniela Vettori and found some vintage cuff links in silver with a mother of pearl inlay. One of my silver necklaces was given to me by Negine’s parents when I first met them. I’ve worn it ever since.
Negine: Ibrahim and I went to Tunisia for a friend’s wedding, and on our way back we had a layover in Istanbul. I’d heard that Turkey is one of the best places to get a custom dress made, so we extended our trip there by a day and went to a shop, Custom Bridal. I told them what I wanted: modest, timeless, and very simple but elevated. I found photos of dresses I like, and picked different parts. This woman just took my measurements, and we stayed in touch via WhatsApp, and I trusted her with my life. She made a beautiful dress that I was really happy with, and I’m still surprised by how that worked out.
Negine: We didn’t have a ceremony because of the ceremony we had the year prior, so we started with a mocktail hour. This great company called Moonlight Mocktails made delicious drinks for everybody. There were little appetizers, like an Afghan take on a samosa, and a lot of fruit, and we also had coffee right off the bat. We used Newhome Coffee for a coffee cart, and they had a little menu of lattes, cappuccinos. Then the wedding started with Ibrahim’s entrance.
Ibrahim: I’m ethnically Syrian, and we did a traditional zaffa entrance. We hired a group, Fusion Zaffa, that orchestrated and led it. They start off with a bunch of poetry and chants and songs giving praise to God and our families, all while playing tablas, these drums held underneath the arm. It’s a slow entrance, and all my male friends followed me in before we switched to Negine’s entrance.
Negine: It’s so energetic and such a beautiful way to start the ceremony. My little cousin was our flower girl, and she threw white rose petals. My cousin Marina, the one who’d gotten ready with me, is a beautiful singer, and she sang the traditional Afghan song “Ahesta Bero,” which translates to “walk slowly.” I walked with my parents while my little brother Edrees held the Quran over my head to symbolize me having good energy and blessings in my new life. I walked too slowly, because she finished singing and had to restart the song.
Ibrahim: We transitioned to the barn, and Negine and I had a first slow dance. I had wanted to take some dance lessons, but we never got to it. Everyone was looking at us, so I was a little nervous.
Negine: It was to Sonya Spence’s “Let Love Flow On.” We don’t have a huge tie to that song other than we saw American Fiction and it plays in one scene. We listened to it over and over again on our drive home — it’s beautiful.
Ibrahim: Before dinner, we all prayed the sunset prayer, then everyone went to their tables. We thanked everybody for coming, and then we had some speeches from our siblings while people were eating. My youngest brother, Adam, is a very captivating speaker, and he talked about my role in his life. It was very touching. Negine’s two middle siblings spoke, and they’re a funny duo.
Negine: There was a moment where my aunts, cousins, and mom held a cloth on top of us. It was a green shawl — green symbolizes nature, freshness, and newness, and the act of putting it over our heads is a blessing for a fresh new future. There’s this tradition called aina-musaaf, where we look into a brand-new mirror, and no one’s supposed to look into it other than the couple. The idea is that we see ourselves anew for the first time.
Ibrahim: You look at yourselves, and then they cover it up, and I think that God willing, that [happy image] is how you’ll stay forever. There’s a lot of mysticism in Afghan culture. Dinner was catered by my favorite kebab grill here in the Los Angeles area, called Mini Kebob. It’s run by this guy named Arman, who’s Armenian. We had your typical Arabic appetizers: mini kebobs, baba ghannouj, hummus, tzatziki, a house salad, and falafel. For the main course, we had grilled lamb chops, shish kebobs, marinated chicken breast, bread, rice, grilled vegetables.
Negine: Food is a big part of our love language. For dessert, there were a lot of Afghan desserts that my mom and aunts made; my aunt has a place called Butterfly Bakery. There was just so much dessert. There’s this one dish called Gosh-e-Fil, which translates to elephant ear; it’s really big and thick and crispy, with powdered sugar. It melts in your mouth. There were cookies, and white fluffy pavlovas with raspberries, which I mostly wanted because the raspberries would match the flowers, but they turned out to be a big hit. And we had cake by one of my favorite bakers, Sasha Piligian. There was so much leftover that we were handing out huge slices at brunch the next day.
Ibrahim: The couple from Newhome Coffee were pulling espressos and making cappuccinos with the cake.
Negine: I was honestly eager to dance. You have all of these feelings in your body and you just want to get the energy out to your favorite music with your favorite people.
Ibrahim: We had to seek out somebody that was familiar with both Afghan and Arabic music, which wasn’t the easiest, but we found a guy, DJ Afghan Lounge. I have him a list of songs and the times we’d want them played.
Negine: I don’t know where this came from, but we both agreed we wouldn’t really have any American music. I think it’s because Arabic music is our favorite to dance to; it’s so upbeat, and it feels really nostalgic for us and our guests.
Ibrahim: Toward the end of the night, everyone got in this very large circle for the traditional Attan, this kind of competitive dance.
Negine: The drums get faster and faster and faster.
Ibrahim: Once you break the rhythm of the group or can’t keep up, you have to step back or take a seat.
Negine: The No. 1 thing that people say about weddings is they go by so fast. So I tried to be so present, like watching all of my cousins and friends lined up along the walls, just beaming, while we had our first dance. Or looking at the leaves moving in the wind, with the sun sparkling through. I’d think, “Okay, this is happening right now.” I’m sure I was creeping people out, looking into their eyes, but during every dance moment, I’d be like, “I’m taking you in!”
Ibrahim: After all the guests had left and the wedding planner cleared us to go, Negine and I and her cousins went to a diner, Norms. I had a milkshake and fries.
Negine: We were all on a high and buzzing and just didn’t want the night to end. And it was really nice, after the wedding, for my mom to be like, “That was incredible. I had so much fun!” Everyone felt that way. I’m glad they trusted me, because it turned out fine.
