THE TREND SETTERS
Five couturiers on staying relevant in the fashion game
He’s been in the brutal business of Bollywood for the last 27 years and survived with his humour and grace intact. Manish Malhotra, couturier
to the stars, is not just moviedom’s leading costume designer but also a wedding designer of considerable repute and revenue--his label, Manish Malhotra, is now worth over `100 crore. Creator of iconic makeovers such as that of Urmila Matondkar in Ram Gopal Varma’s Rangeela and memorable looks such as Kareena Kapoor in Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met, Malhotra was the closing designer for two of India’s premier fashion weeks this year, the Lakme Fashion Week and India Couture Week. The former Gold Spot model, now an incrediibly young looking 50, brought structured styling to Bollywood and a series of grateful stars, stretching from Sridevi to Alia Bhatt, have been his biggest advertisements since. Today, reinvention is the name of the game and Malhotra as well as his contemporaries are holding their own, quietly turning a corner, honing their skills and turning their first mover advantage to a real step-up decades on. From Ashish Soni and the Abu-Sandeep duo who are as sought after today than they were when they started out, to others like Rajesh Pratap Singh and Sanjay Garg who are from different design decades but share a similar vision for the Indian loom, our cover story explores the warp and weft of fashion down the ages.