What Are Attendant Formations? Are They Traditional?

Flexibility is key to figuring out creative attendant situations. There are no formal rules here, except the legal requirement that you have two witnesses stand up for you during the ceremony. The rest is up to you.

Many religions dictate the proper order for the wedding processional. Check with your church's or temple’s wedding coordinator to see if you can break from tradition. In most cases, you can. In Christian, Jewish, and civil ceremonies, bridesmaids and groomsmen typically enter individually or in same-sex pairs. An example of how to tweak tradition: If a guy is standing up for the bride, the bride might choose to have him and the rest of her bridesmaids each walk down the aisle by themselves to eliminate all female pairs and one male-female pairing. Or the bridesmaids can walk in pairs and the guy can walk alone.

If you have a wildly unequal number of attendants and you're including opposite-sex attendants in your wedding, consider attendant-swapping to balance things. For example, if the bride has a male friend she wants to stand up for her but she already has too many female attendants, the bride's male friend can stand on the groom's side. Often, the groom doesn't have as many attendants he'd like participating in the wedding, and having a bride's friend on the groom's side evens out the numbers.