A Chicago Couple’s Party-Filled Wedding Week in Dubai
As a little girl in Canada, Alisiyah Daya’s favorite thing to think about was Dubai. Her mother recalls her staring at photos of the Burj Khalifa, and she loved to read about how the city was founded. When she met Daniel George, whose company does business there, they eventually traveled there together. Once engaged, the Chicago couple visited 12 to 15 potential venues in the city. “When we got to the Burj, it was just so breathtaking looking up and seeing how grand the building is. It was also a blank enough space that we could make it ours,” Alisiyah says. “There’s a bit of irony in it as well, because we’re [both] short [people] and Burj Khalifa is the tallest thing,” Daniel adds.
Guests began arriving a week before the weekend, and events got progressively bigger each day. “If you’re around us, it’s going to be a thing,” Alisiyah says with confidence. “We have to give [guests] the Alisiyah and Daniel Dubai experience.”
The week kicked off with a party at 1 Oak, which the couple rented out. They know a lot of big DJs in Dubai, some of whom came and played sets. “[First] it’s 50 to 70 people, and then every night gets bigger because more people are flying in,” says Alisiyah, a senior practice manager at Northwestern Memorial HealthCare. Subsequent evenings were spent at the lounge Soho Garden and the bar Honeycomb Hi-Fi.
“We wanted to give our family a really incredible trip,” says Daniel. His family is Indian, while Alisiyah’s is French and Indian. “We both come from families where weddings are extremely large and in areas or venues that are a bit more mundane, so we thought, Okay, how do we actually give our parents and our families an exclusive and intimate experience somewhere that they’ve never been before?”
The Yacht Party
The day before the wedding, Alisiyah and Daniel hosted 250 guests on a 240-foot boat. The party had an all-white dress code. “Our families, they don’t do all-white parties. They’ve never done all this stuff. So, we really gave them this experience I feel like they’d never had,” says Daniel. They had a live band playing jazz and R&B, as well as a DJ, and served a five-course dinner.
“On the yacht, we had a whole merch line. My company builds brand campaigns and logos for a ton of large companies, like Nike, Jordan, Apple, and Verizon,” Daniel says. Designers that he’s worked with created a special logo set for the wedding, dubbed The George Yacht Club. “If you look at it, it feels fairly timeless and minimalist.”
Over the course of the evening, Daniel and Alisiyah took time to introduce the members of their wedding party and explain the relationship they had to them. The bridal party also gave speeches about the couple.
The Dress
“I just like to make things a moment in life. Everything is a big deal for me,” Alisiyah confesses. She wanted to make the dress process fun and exciting, so she traveled to New York City to try things on. She ended up getting her Lee Petra Grebenau dress at Spina Bride. “I really just felt like a bride in the dress. It has an over skirt over it, and I wanted to emulate how grand the venue was. I knew that I either had to do something really simple and shock everyone, and then let the venue speak for itself, or I needed to match the grandiosity that people were expecting, but still make it my own,” she says.
Alisiyah’s mother had always wanted her to try on her wedding dress, but she didn’t do it until a trip home to Toronto after she was engaged. “My mom got married in 1990, and she had this really typical ’90s [silhouette], but it’s really cool that [the style is] coming back now when I’m getting married...big sleeves, corseted, a little rosette at the back, it’s absolutely stunning,” she says. “I tried on the dress secretly, and it fit an absolute glove: the waist, the height, the way it falls. It was almost as if it was made for me.” As a surprise for her mother, Alisiyah wore the dress to her rehearsal dinner.
The Suits
Daniel went to the Thom Browne store in Miami and ended up with an outfit for the yacht party, as well as a tuxedo for his wedding day. “They warned me that it was going to be hot, because Thom Browne’s material can be the heavier canvas,” he says. “I didn’t care...it looked amazing.”
The Music
The bride, who is from Canada, absolutely loves Drake, so much so that she coordinated a Drake playlist for the whole wedding. The groom and groomsmen entered to “Over My Dead Body,” the bride walked down the aisle to “Over,” and the couple left the ceremony to “God’s Plan.”
“When you get married, there’s this pressure of, ‘Okay, this is wedding music. These are the wedding songs.’ And that’s just not us. We just wanted to make it feel like us—a party that I would want to attend and be at. I don’t want to be bored of my own wedding, so we were really careful about how we curated the music,” she says. People were pretty surprised by that.
The Ceremony
The first time the couple saw each other on their wedding day was when Alisiyah walked down the aisle. Prior to that, the groom was extremely nervous. “I’m pacing back and forth in the back because the beginning of my vows are in French and I don’t speak French,” Daniel says. French is Alisiyah’s first language. “Her dad was in my ear trying to get me to say everything right the whole time.”
As the couple and guests exited the ceremony, the Dubai Fountain, the largest fountain in the world, went off. “It was beautiful,” Daniel says. Whereas the Indian weddings in their families can go as long as four hours, their ceremony was a sleek 45 minutes.
The Reception
During the dinner, the famous Indian DJ duo MadStarBase performed. “They were able to take our heritage, which is Indian music, and fuse it with more Caribbean, hip-hop, and R&B type of vibes,” Daniel says. In the middle of the party, the groom and his cousins surprised Alisiyah with a coordinated Indian dance. After the reception, everyone headed up to the top of the Burj Khalifa, where the club 3BK was bought out for the whole evening.
“We nailed it,” Daniel says emphatically. “There were a lot of high-profile people there that you don’t ever see get loose ever. By the end of the night, they were probably the wildest [guests] of all. We had 230 people. In our opinion, that maybe feels small. To others, it may feel very large, but by the end of it, everyone was best friends.”
The couple held a welcome party on a 240-foot yacht.
The dress code was all-white.
Alisiyah gets ready with her maid of honor, Abeer Khan.
“I love French detailing,” Alisiyah says. “It was delicate, beautiful, and feminine, but it also had a really beautiful presence about it.”
Daniel puts on the finishing touches to his look.
The groom with his groomsmen.
The bride’s bridal party.
Daniel and Alisiyah had 230 guests, which is relatively small by the standards of many Indian families.
The flower girl arrives.
Alisiyah and her father.
Daniel read his vows in French, Alisiyah’s first language.
The fountains went off as the ceremony ended.
Place settings at the reception.
The first dance.
The after-party went late into the night.
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