Mumbai, January 12: Film award ceremonies that are held at the beginning of every year are manna to an otherwise lull in fashion; they bring high-octane glamour to the banal spring-summer mood.
The year began with the most revered of all statuettes, the Star Screen Awards, where this year especially, the red-carpet equaled the glitz on the stage. Katrina Kaif wore a beautiful easy-to-recognise Marchesa gown in her favoured red again. Nominee Amrita Puri of Aisha wore a glamorous Grecian, gold, floor-length from new talent Vizyon.
Newbie bride Priyanka Oberoi wore a spectacular cocktail sari from the master-of-cocktail-saris, Gaurav Gupta. Sonakshi Sinha showed off her oomph in a backless mini figure-hugger from Shantanu and Nikhil. And Maria Goretti looked resplendent in, would you believe, a handspun sari, racer-back blouse and a garden of jasmines in her loose chignon. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.
The crowd’s favourite was indie-movie star Kalki Koechlin who wore a baroque printed gown by a lesser-known but immensely talented designer called Preeti S Kapoor.
Among the men, mercifully no one went on stage in jeans. Right from Amol Palekar to Ram Kapoor to Manish Sharma to Vivek Oberoi and, yes, even Salman Khan-of-the-ripped-jeans fame, wore a nice suit.
Film actors at Indian award ceremonies are finally getting it right. In just a handful of years of fashion-policing by journalists, they have realised and optimised the power of the red carpet.
The earliest reference to the red carpet is in literature, in Aeschylus’s well-referenced play Agamemnon, written in 458 BC. Agamemnon returns from Troy and is welcomed by his vengeful wife Clytemnestra, who offers him a red-carpet to walk on, as if he were a god.
–Agenies