We’ve all grown up with Manish Malhotra, whether we knew it or not. Long before we understood what couture meant — before we could tell organza from chiffon, or knew that zardozi was a 500-year-old craft from the Mughal courts, we knew those clothes. We knew the way Kajol’s red sari moved in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. We knew Kareena Kapoor’s Poo-era wardrobe in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham — the midriff-baring -coordinates, the baby pink sets, the message of it all as an early education in what it meant for a woman to take up space, confidently and completely, through what she wore.
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We knew Preity Zinta’s ethereal blue lehenga in Kal Ho Naa Ho, which half of us have since tried to replicate at a cousin’s wedding. We knew Urmila Matondkar in Rangeela — the film that announced Malhotra to the industry in 1995, the Filmfare award for costume design that followed, and the understanding that clothes, in the right hands, could rewrite an actress’s entire screen identity.
We just didn’t know his name yet. But we were already fluent in his language.
From The First Sketch To Alia Bhatt’s Tulle Trail
What brought all of this back recently was a post. Malhotra dipped into his archives and shared unseen backstage footage from one of his grand shows — the fittings that ran longer than expected, the last-minute pinning, the quiet charged seconds before the lights came on. And then, the moment it all built toward: Alia Bhatt closing the show as his showstopper, radiant in a champagne-gold embellished couture look, the skirt dissolving into layers of soft tulle that moved like smoke with every step, a long sheer veil trailing behind her, a bold red lip cutting clean through all that gold. Sleek centre-parted bun. Nothing accidental.
It is a very specific kind of image. The showstopper at a milestone show, the clothes and the woman carrying the look equally poised — and it does what the best fashion moments do: it makes you feel something before you’ve quite understood what you’re looking at. Twenty years of a label, distilled into a single walk down a runway.
He Sketched It, Stitched It, And Watched Bollywood Fall In Love With It
The eponymous label turns twenty this year — two decades since Malhotra formalized what had been building for fifteen years on film sets, in makeup vans, across hundreds of scripts and storylines where the costume was never separate from the character. 2026 also marks 36 years of his work in Indian cinema, which means there are now two generations of women who have grown up watching his clothes onscreen and then, at some point, wanting them for themselves. That shift from aspiration to acquisition, from the cinema hall to the bridal atelier — is perhaps his most quietly remarkable achievement.
A Manish Malhotra lehenga is not simply a garment. It is a milestone. The kind of thing people save for, plan around, remember. And that is not an accident of commerce. It is the long, slow result of a designer who understood, very early, that emotion is the most durable material of all.
His first real break came with Juhi Chawla in Swarg in 1990, but it was Sridevi who, in the early years, became something close to a muse. He painted a continuity sweater for her by hand for Khuda Gawah. He dressed her in Lamhe, watched her work, and learned what it meant for a garment to do more than decorate. The vocabulary he built across those years — that instinctive understanding of how a woman inhabits a costume, how the clothes could carry emotion that the screenplay couldn’t — is precisely what translated, eventually, into the language of couture.
What Rangeela did for Urmila Matondkar, the industry had not quite seen before. The film’s look — bold, Western-inflected, street-smart and sensuous in equal measure, was radical for mainstream Hindi cinema in 1995. It wasn’t just that the clothes were beautiful. They were right. They told you who she was before she spoke. That alignment between character and costume, between the inner life of a role and its outer expression, became Malhotra’s signature. By the time Deepika Padukone’s cocktail looks in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani arrived in 2013, an entire fashion vocabulary had shifted — what women wanted to wear to their best friend’s wedding, what they asked their tailors to replicate, what they saved on Pinterest and carried to consultations — all of it tracing back, in some way, to what he had been building across two decades of cinema.
Zardozi Never Looked This Effortless
The label itself, when it launched in 2005, was less a departure than a translation. Everything Malhotra had learned about how clothes carry feeling, how a woman should feel held by a garment rather than simply dressed in one, how the body moves through fabric and not against it — all of that moved with him from the film set to the atelier.
The craftsmanship is where it becomes most legible. His design vocabulary draws from a deep archive of Indian handwork techniques — zardozi, aari, threadwork, Taban — each chosen not for ornament alone, but for what it does to the surface it inhabits.
Zardozi in particular — that dense, gilded embroidery with roots in Mughal court dress — has historically been associated with weight, with grandeur, with a kind of visual authority that demands to be looked at. What Malhotra has spent twenty years doing is softening that authority. Making it move. The embroidery in his hands follows the garment’s logic rather than asserting its own — it travels with the drape, breathes within the silhouette, holds its detail without slowing the whole thing down. This is harder than it sounds. And it is precisely why a Manish Malhotra lehenga at a wedding looks alive in a way that many others don’t.
Twenty Years In, And The Best Is Still Being Stitched
Beyond the atelier, his long-running collaboration with the Mijwan Welfare Society — the NGO founded by the late poet Kaifi Azmi and headed today by Shabana Azmi has quietly done something equally important: keeping traditional chikankari embroidery alive by employing rural women artisans in Uttar Pradesh, whose handwork finds its way into his couture collections. It is the kind of institutional commitment that doesn’t generate many headlines, but represents, perhaps, the most honest expression of what he actually believes about Indian craft — that it isn’t heritage to be preserved under glass, but a living practice that must be worn, commissioned, and valued.
2026, the year of the twentieth anniversary, turned out to be something else entirely: the year the work went global in a way that felt definitive rather than provisional.
Last year in May, at the Met Gala, he became the first Indian designer to present four distinct narratives on that red carpet in a single evening — styling Natasha Poonawalla in sculptural gara, Coco Jones in architectural pearls, while himself appearing in a strikingly modern silhouette, and then Rihanna, adorned in MM High Jewellery.
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If there was a moment that announced the arrival of Indian couture on the most scrutinised fashion stage in the world, that was probably it. Not an invitation extended as a courtesy, but a presence that had been earned.Then, in June, Beyoncé and her crew stepped out in custom Manish Malhotra chaps during the Cowboy Carter Tour.
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And in September 2024, he became the first Indian designer to showcase at Harrods London, presenting his World Collection in the store’s exclusive Private Shopping Penthouse — a collection that wove zardozi, chikankari, and gota patti embroidery through silks and velvets and chiffons in a way that felt neither apologetically traditional nor strainingly contemporary.
Looking back at twenty years, the archive is extraordinary. But what stands out more than the individual garments is the consistency of the underlying project: the conviction that Indian craft is not a reference to be borrowed but a foundation to build from. That couture can carry memory. That clothes, in the right hands, are never just clothes.
