Holy Matrimony! From Gotham City to Goths, Weddings with a Twist

At "Wayne Manor" in Monrovia, the bride and groom posed for pictures before being driven away in a Batmobile.

For another couple, Castle Green in Pasadena became a haunted mansion, decorated with black manzanita trees, black roses in Gothic urns and glowing white pumpkins for a "Nightmare Before Christmas" wedding.

In Orange, Alice found Wonderland at the French Estate Inn and spent her wedding reception playing croquet with the Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter.

Every couple wants to create something unique with their wedding plans. They all want a perfect fusion of elegance and romance, as well as an event that will be memorable for everyone.

But it's hard to take something old and make it new.

Given that society has been staging the same show for hundreds of years, isn't it time to shake it up a little?

Tiffani Sullivan of Untamed Bride encourages couples to let loose their imaginations and plan from the heart.

"You don't have to plan your wedding the way every single person does," said Sullivan. "It's not necessary anymore. You have to go with your heart and do what's true to you."

Wedding-planning season kicks off each fall with a host of bridal shows. On Thursday, the Hollywood Underground Bridal Show will offer an "alternative" twist - custom-made dresses catwalked by ghostly models with white hair, all staged in a graffiti-covered underground parking lot at the heart of the Hollywood Strip.

For couples looking for something a little different from the norm, edgy bridal shows are a good place to start. It also helps to live in a city renowned for quirkiness and perversity, where the bride can carry a light-sabre and the groom can don a Darth Vader costume.

Sullivan's alternative wedding company organizes themed weddings for atypical brides and grooms. Her clientele includes sci-fi buffs, comic-book nerds, Goths, rockabillies, dog lovers and horror movie fanatics, all looking for a way to fuse romantic passion with a passion for the strange.

It's not always an easy task.

"The Batman wedding was a little bit difficult because the bride didn't want costumes, and the groom wanted a Batman-themed wedding," said Sullivan, who coordinated the wedding for KROQ (106.7 FM) DJ Ralph Garman. "What we ended up doing was compromising with a Bruce Wayne theme, which was very elegant."

Instead of costumes, the wedding party went for classic chic, with the groomsmen in black tuxedos and the bridesmaids wearing white gloves. A Batman symbol was projected on the wall, and a '60s-style Batmobile - with an Adam West look-alike in the driver's seat - was the wedding car.

It sounds like a lot of work, but Sullivan says themed weddings take the same amount of time to plan as traditional ones and can cost much less.

"It turns out that you can actually find more budget-friendly vendors and facilities if you look to the more unique properties," said Sullivan, who has organized weddings in Hollywood-style movie studios, historical mansions and private estates across Los Angeles. "It's a way to save money as well as get a totally unique experience."

Not that brides are necessarily looking to save money. Despite the lagging economy, local wedding planners say brides aren't budging when it comes to their big day.

"Families have been saving for this their whole lives," said Kathy Recchia, a Manhattan Beach wedding planner.

Recchia said the average wedding she plans costs $40,000 to $60,000. If her clients cut back at all, she said, it's on smaller items. They might go with a DJ instead of a band, or chicken instead of steak.

"They figure out what's important to them, what's a deal breaker to them," she says. "No matter what the economy, people are finding ways to pay for it."

Of course, for the bride, the primary focus often is the wedding dress - and a unique one at that.

Vintage is an upcoming trend in bridal wear, and custom-made gowns are the surest way to walk down the aisle in style without looking like a "cookie-cutter" bride.

Designer Deborah La Franchi takes her clients to the Los Angeles fashion district to help them decide on fabrics and styles before she creates their custom bridal gown. The dresses range from $3,000 to $5,000 but come with the guarantee that no other bride will ever step into it.

"That's really what they're paying for when they hire me to design a dress," said La Franchi. "It's that one-on-one service from a designer who is creating a gown just for them."

After establishing herself as a costume designer, La Franchi decided to partner her theatrical expertise with the bridal fashion industry.

"Designing a bridal gown isn't that much different from designing for a theatrical production," said La Franchi. "You're still designing for a setting, whether it's a beach or a cathedral."

Among La Franchi's dramatic bridal designs are Elizabethan and medieval dresses, as well as colored gowns.

"Color is becoming a very popular thing for wedding gowns," said La Franchi. "The traditional white gown was started by Queen Victoria, but before that, gowns were actually colored. Light blue was the most popular gown because that was the color of purity."

La Franchi's most recent designs include a light pink wedding dress and an ivory gown made from Italian silk, patterned with vegetable dye.

"Every bride wants something different," said La Franchi, who is featuring her 2009 designs at the bridal runway show on Thursday. In true alternative style, the show will fuse edgy with artistic by incorporating an art gallery and casino gaming area into the fashion event.

Meanwhile, Sullivan is busy planning for a Tim Burton-themed wedding, transforming a Catholic mission in Riverside into a Gothic utopia.

"If you really want it to stand out, maybe with a diverse hobby that you want to represent, you don't have to be afraid," said Sullivan. "It will still be very elegant - and you can use tradition as a guideline - but let's have some fun."