The doyen of Indian fashion, Ritu Kumar, weaving the trendy tales for last four decades, stuns with her costumes which she has designed the wedding sequences of Deepa Mehta’s upcoming film Midnight’s Children.
The outfits are designed by Ritu Kumar after research on the royal costumes of the Muslim families of pre-Independence India. From creating the looks from the turn of the last century with vintage costumes, especially reflecting the way of life of India under the colonial rule, with all its grace and intricacies, it encapsulates three Muslim weddings in Northern India.
The “poshaaks”, or ensembles, worn by the Begums for their weddings consisted of a three piece ensemble – a kurta, a farshi pajama and a dupatta. Ritu reprises the act using references from her book “Costumes and Textiles of Royal India” to achieve the unique look of the past.
In movie Soha ali Khan will be seen wearing a white ensemble made of chanderi silk cotton hand woven fabric. An angarkha cut full is worn over the tunic of white chanderi. The ensemble is hand embroidered with natural silk cotton ecru yarns to give a look of jaaliwork which is a reflection of marble and white effects used in North India on clothing.
While the ensembles worn by Shahana Goswami have a pajama where the upper part is made of deep teal blue brocade, and the lower half is made of blue, emerald green and gold stripes of patched silk. A teal blue dupatta completes the ensemble.
About designing costumes for this much anticipated movie, Ritu said, “It is a great honour for me to be associated with such a large-scale film. It’s a mammoth production with so many characters and it was really exciting to work on each and every one of them. It took about six months during which I went through a lot books on the history of fashion.”
The ensembles designed for the movie will be showcased through special permission from the makers of “Midnights Children” for the first time as part of an Exhibition on Vintage Indian Textiles & Craft Forms at the Ritu Kumar flagship store at Crescent Store, New Delhi on 23rd and 24th October 2012, giving visitors an insight into the fading history of Indian embroidery techniques and fashion forms at the turn of the century.
The film which is going to release later this year mainly features the actors like Rahul Bose, Soha Ali Khan and Shahana Goswami, and is based on Salman Rushdie’s Booker prize winning novel of the same name.