Women Wedding Guests Prepare Their Clothes

Women do not generally travel in their takshitas.  If possible, they dress at the home of the bride just before the ceremony begins.

The female guests will arrive at your house with suitcases. While one bedroom is devoted to the bride and her 5 or 6 or 7 garment changes, the rest of your home, save the bathroom and kitchen, becomes one giant dressing room. The women get out of their travel clothes to get dressed and prepare for the wedding. Dresses, shoes, scarves, jewelry and make-up all come out of the bags. The women transform themselves and each other into sparkling showcases. Young and old, all of the women who may not even normally wear make-up, get dolled-up for the occasion.

A formal  dress worn to a Moroccan wedding is called a takshita (tak SHEET-ah). The older women are usually covered head-to-toe, but the younger women may wear newer styles of the takshita and appear bare-headed or with short sleeves or with dresses split to show skinny-legged pants underneath. But all of this is still modest by Western standards.  No one wears anything that is cut, as they say, up to here and down to there. But all of them come with strappy sandals and glittery dresses--sequined, shimmery, or embroidered with gold or silver threads.   And of course there is jewelry of gold, silver, pearl and all sorts of sparkling stones.

Once inside the wedding tent when the music starts, out of nowhere come the scarves that the women tie around their hips to better show off the moves of their dances.

The women and closely related male relatives gather inside the tent to sing, to dance, to eat, to view wedding gifts from the groom to the bride and to get photographed with the couple in any of the many bridal outfits worn during the ceremony by the bride and groom. Any non-related men have chairs and tables and are served outside.  Male waiters, photographers and entertainers don't count. Wedding logic. Go figure.

For families that want to have a sunnah wedding with male and female guests entertained separatedly, there are a couple of options. A high-end wedding may have two tents set up for males and females separately, but that typically doesn't happen because of the expense. More commonly, if the family maintains male-female separation, they may have a sunnah wedding in which all of the wedding proceedings take place in a female-only setting.  The men will have a banquet separately.