When Diipa Khosla met Oleg Büller on her first day at university in Amsterdam, she admits she was “a little bit of a bitch” to him. “I arrived there the first day, and I was a few days late because I have an Indian passport so I had some visa issues,” the now 28-year-old explains. “So pretty much all the new students had made their friend groups and everything. My parents dropped me off at the main reception, and the very first guy I saw is now my husband.”
Dutch-American Oleg, now 32, was in his final year and the university’s student body president. He invited Diipa to take a seat in his office while she got her bearings. “I still very clearly remember sitting in his office that first time and him just trying to be kind and polite and talk to me,” she remembers. “I was this new student, completely intimidated and being a little bit of a bitch to him because I was like, ‘oh my god, I look shit, I have no makeup on, and he looks like James Dean. Shit, shit, shit.’”
While the pair connected on Facebook, their social lives didn’t intersect much. “He had his own group of friends, and I had mine,” Diipa says. “But there was always a curiosity. I would know when he would enter a room, you know? [But] he was notoriously known to be a player, he had all these rumors about him… I was just like stay clear of him, he’s not your kind of guy.”
Five years later, when Diipa’s career as an influencer was taking off in London, and Oleg had started his career as a diplomat for the Dutch Foreign Service, he sent her a birthday message on Facebook. A dialogue began and they continued the conversation in Messenger. “He was like, whenever you’re back in Amsterdam I’d love to take you out for real.” Diipa was interested, but Oleg’s university reputation made her suspicious, so it wasn’t until around six months later that the date finally happened.
“It was perfect,” Diipa remembers. “Italian restaurant by the canal on this late summer evening… We already knew on that first date it was nothing normal, you know? This was already very magical and we were connecting on every level.”
At one point during their dinner, Oleg recalled their first meeting. “He said, ‘You were wearing that hoodie, and you were sitting inside my office and being a complete bitch to me.’” Diipa was stunned. “He met, I think about a thousand students that week. So for him to remember… He said, ‘I don’t know, you just left a little impression on me.’”
The pair were smitten, and officially dating within about a month. “We just connected on everything,” Diipa says. “I was from India, from this traditional Indian family, and he was born in Boston and raised in Amsterdam, but for some reason our foundations and the way we looked at the world were the same.”
It wasn’t long after that Oleg mentioned marriage. “It was New Year’s Eve, and he comes up to my ear and he’s like, ‘This is the year I’m going to ask you to marry me’ – and this is, mind you, three months after being official.” Diipa didn’t take Oleg seriously, but in mid-2016 they started planning a trip to her native India together during the holidays, as Oleg had never been.
As their travel date neared, their calendars started filling up. But less than a week before they were set to fly, Oleg called from his then post in Baghdad with bad news. “He tells me, ‘My ambassador just called me in, and it turns out I have to go on a secret mission and I can’t tell you anything about it—it’s state secret. I’m going to have to skip the first couple of days of India,” Diipa remembers. “Of course I was bummed, but he was so convincing. I mean, there’s a lot of things he can’t tell me about his job,” she says.
Diipa took her sister as her plus-one to an event in India while Oleg was off working. “It was a 45-minute drive and we finally see this amazing hotel on top of a hill,” she says. They were greeted by paparazzi at the entrance, as well as the hotel manager, who told her she was very late and that he must rush her to the event. “I’m like, ‘Where’s the dinner? Where are the people? I don’t hear anything.’ Finally we enter this courtyard, and there’s candles all around it. And there’s someone playing the flute in the background. And then I walk up into the courtyard, and at the end of it I see this guy in a tuxedo. And it’s quite dark, but then I go up a little closer and I look up again and [Oleg] was standing right there.”
Oleg had staged a surprise engagement that was six months in the making, spanning multiple countries and countless people, including Diipa’s manager and her family. “I was just in utter shock, I kept asking, ‘Wait, you’re not in Baghdad? You’re really here?’” Of course, Diipa accepted Oleg’s ring, which featured a diamond that had been in his family for five generations, reset by an Amsterdam jeweller especially for her. “It was the most shocking, beautiful proposal ever,” she says.
When it came to their wedding, Oleg and Diipa had very different tastes and expectations. Diipa wanted a big celebration with both a traditional Indian ceremony and a European one, while Oleg had something smaller and understated in mind. “It was our friends who convinced us to have it in India,” Diipa says. “They were like, ‘Guys, come on, we’ve seen enough weddings in Italy and France. Can we get a crazy, big, fat Indian wedding?’”
The pair chose to host the wedding at Fateh Garh Palace, taking it over for the duration of the four-day event. “It had just enough rooms for our guests – we wanted it to be our own little utopia for four days,” Diipa says.
They invited their 100 guests with invites from Sketch Design Studio and recruited two wedding planners; Ankit to handle the organization, and Alt Air to oversee the flowers and décor. The first day of wedding celebrations included a Mehendi ceremony, in which the bride’s hands and feet are decorated with henna, followed by the Sangeet, a lively pre-wedding party with musical performances. Day two began with the Haldi ceremony, in which the bride and groom are covered with a turmeric paste by family and friends — the yellow hue of the spice is believed to purify the souls of the bride and groom-to-be.
After the Haldi, the bride and groom are separated. Diipa participated in the Chooda, an intimate Punjabi tradition in which the bride is given red and white bangles by her family to signify the start of her married life. Meanwhile, Oleg made his entrance on a white horse in a party-style procession called the Baraat. The pair were reunited for the Indian wedding ceremony, which was followed by a lavish reception. The third day of festivities comprised of the European wedding ceremony and a later reception dinner and dancing.
Diipa admits that she and Oleg had completely different approaches to the planning process: “[Oleg] was always more concerned about the macro things, like, ‘Let’s make sure people are fed, let’s make sure they’re sleeping well,’” and I was more, ‘What about the font of the name cards?’”
Because there were multiple events taking place in the same venue, Diipa wanted each to have its own theme. “The Indian wedding dinner and reception had this very ethereal, white roses and gold theme, while the Indian wedding itself was very rich and very, very regal. Kind of like that Rajasthan, old Indian palace vibe,” Diipa explains. “We tried to source local flowers to help the community as well. So it was mostly from local vendors that would be outside temples or on the sides of the roads.”
For the European wedding, the look was more minimalist. “The European wedding was very south of France, nothing over the top because we’d had so much grandeur over the past two, three days,” Diipa says. “We went for local flowers as much as possible – we also got a lot of white roses from New Delhi if I’m not mistaken.”
With two wedding ceremonies across four days of celebrations, Diipa wore multiple bridal looks—nine in total—including a Pronovias reception party gown and a 44lb skirt by Aashni & Co for the Indian wedding reception. The wedding dresses were the showstoppers: an Ashi Studio couture gown for the European ceremony, and the Sabyasachi ensemble she wore for the Indian wedding.
“I don’t think anyone does couture better than [Ashi],” she says. “I just love his vision; I love the way he makes women look in his dresses. So it was for me a done deal. I’m like, Ashi or nothing.”
Diipa first met with the Lebanon-based designer in Paris to discuss ideas. “He sent me a sketch a month later of how he envisioned it and I was already blown away,” she says. “I was like, ‘This is it, this is done, that’s the dress.’”
Together, they planned the fabrics and embroidery, and over the course of three fittings, the gown took shape. “It had all the Ashi elements in it, and for the first time ever, he made one of his bridal couture pieces in a cream white instead of ivory white,” Diipa says, explaining that the cream hue better suited her skin tone. “It just was perfect. It was better anyone could dream in a fairytale. It was literally like a Disney princess.” She wore it with Aquazurra heels, while Oleg wore a Boggi Milano tux. Both wedding day looks were completed by their Taylor & Hart wedding bands.
For the Indian wedding ceremony, both Diipa and Oleg wore Sabyasachi, the same brand chosen by Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas for their recent wedding. “Usually an Indian bride wears red, but I wanted to be a little bit different and wear maroon instead,” Diipa explains. “It was very heavy–the skirt was 20kg (44lbs). But it had gold embroidered in it, with maroon velvet on the skirt so it was really beautiful. I felt like a warrior queen in that outfit. It was really amazing.”
Diipa had already worked with many top beauty brands and stylists in her work as an influencer, so she called on her friends to help with her wedding. MAC artist Nisha Sirpal created her makeup looks, Aveda stylist Aamir Naveed did her hair, Clinique took care of her skin, and Jo Malone scented the venue. “They’re good friends, so it was very organic, but it was the first time [the Estée Lauder group of companies] did such a big multi-brand collaboration on someone’s wedding,” Diipa says. “They flew down, I think it was 800 candles, and the makeup artists and hair artists sent goody bags for all the guests.”
The couple chose not to have bridesmaids and groomsmen in the traditional sense for the European wedding because Oleg has so many close friends. “It would just be 25 [people] standing next to him, and I just don’t have 25 close girlfriends,” Diipa says. Instead, they had their siblings standing by their sides for the ceremony, though Diipa’s bridesmaids were identified by their Amsale bridesmaids gowns.
For the Indian wedding, all the bridesmaids (who wore Mani Jassal) and groomsmen (in Boggi Milano) were given different responsibilities. “During the Indian wedding, my bridesmaids walked me down the aisle and that was really special for them,” Diipa says. “[The groomsmen’s] main task was during the [part where the groom] comes in on a horse, is just to go crazy and dance around him.”
Guests were entertained by local dancers and singers, as well as snake charmers and tarot readers. “Anything to do with that fantasy, Aladdin-ish life,” Diipa says. They kept the food largely traditional Indian too. “Every day had a different cuisine of India. So one day it was from the region where we were having the wedding, one day it was from the region where our family’s from, Punjab, and then one day it was Hyderabadi.” But like many brides, Diipa didn’t have much opportunity to enjoy it. “I wish I got to enjoy it a little bit more, but I was too stressed out,” she admits.
The couple didn’t plan to have a first dance – a compromise because while Diipa’s family loves the drama of an entrance or a moment, Oleg’s family is more restrained in their taste. “For them, everything is ‘make it understated,’” Diipa says. “They actually have this phrase in Dutch, ‘doe normaal’, which means be normal; like, can you not be over the top?”
Ultimately, the dance happened anyway. Oleg’s sister is a talented singer, and her gift was a performance for the couple. She instructed them to hold hands and look at each other while she sang, and at some point, they began dancing. “We forgot everyone else was there,” Diipa says. “It was very special.”
As an influencer, photography and video footage of the wedding was very important to Diipa, though she admits she went a little overboard: “There was a point where I felt there were a too many [people], I think there were 10 in total,” she says. “Three were videographers [Muse Motion Films] and one was a live editor so he would be editing every day. There was one photographer [FIH Fotografie] we flew in from the Netherlands; I really liked her vibe, because she’s more of a storyteller, she captures emotions. The other photographer [Zohaib Ali] and his team came from London—his focus was more on the clothes and the décor…and I wanted a bit of both. And then there were two local photographers as well just to capture family and guests.”
Though she had planned to share images and video from her wedding to her social media followers as the wedding was happening, Diipa didn’t account for the hotel’s poor internet. “I decided just to tell my followers, ‘This is not working. I’m just going to enjoy my wedding,’” she says. “I really just enjoyed the moment.”
Once she did start posting a few days later though, her followers went wild. “It went crazy on Instagram,” she says. “I never got so many views and likes on photos. My following increased by 90,000 in a week-and-a-half.”
The response was so significant that Diipa was invited to collaborate with MAC on a collection inspired by her wedding makeup. “It’s the first time an Indian influencer has created her own bridal makeup box,” she says. “It’s really cool, really different.”
The couple concluded their wedding celebrations with a five-day buddymoon. “You’re not going to come all the way to India and just leave after four days. You’re going to want to spend a little more time there and enjoy it,” Diipa said. The group of 24 took over a private island in Goa with their closest friends “We took over these cottages right on the beach. It was amazing.”
She and Oleg plan to have a proper honeymoon this year. “We hope to go to Everest because we love climbing,” she says. “So that’s what we want to do, to try to trek up to Base Camp.”
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