Ritu Kumar breaks into Bollywood

After staying away for many decades, fashion stalwart finally agrees to dress Dia Mirza for her reel-life wedding...

Despite being a stalwart of the Indian fashion industry, designer Ritu Kumar has never been tempted by Bollywood. “I’ve stayed away because in the past, the mood of the films was never really consistent and the clothes didn’t seem well thought out. Those kind of over-the-top projects didn’t interest me,” she says.

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But Kumar is set to break her own rules with Dia Mirza’s upcoming production, Love Breakups Zindagi, which hits theatres on October 7. “In this case, Dia wanted real-life clothes for the wedding sequences in the movie. She had walked the ramp for me when I presented my Falaknuma collection, and she settled on having the same look in her film,” she reveals, explaining her first brush with the Hindi film industry.

Kumar’s brief was to create fun clothes that were young in spirit, but represented the modern Indian wedding wardrobe. She says, “I thought this would be a nice change, and I’m quite happy with the end result because they didn’t look like costumes. The colour palette, style of the garments, matching ghararas with gilets and jackets all that was done by me. You see a mix of silhouettes in the film. For example, in one sequence, Dia is wearing a purple lehenga with a gilet, which was traditionally worn by men. That’s what I mean by young fashion.”

Kumar’s next project is designing wedding ensembles for Deepa Mehta’s Wind Of Change, based on Salman Rushdie’s prize-winning novel, Midnight’s Children.