Iconic Bollywood Fashion Trends: From Bobby to Bajirao Mastani

Ask any Indian moviegoer about a fashion trend they once copied from a film, and chances are a Hindi cinema look comes to mind first. From knotted polka-dot shirts to Patiala salwars slung with jholas, Bollywood has functioned as an unofficial fashion school for decades, sending trends straight from the screen to the neighbourhood tailor. This isn’t a coincidence. Costume designers on Hindi films research, experiment, and sometimes reinvent entire garment categories, and audiences respond by recreating those looks in real wardrobes. Let’s trace how five decades of iconic films shaped the way India dresses.

Bobby (1973): The polka dot revolution 🔗

Before “polka dot” became a universal print name in India, it was simply called the Bobby print. Seventeen-year-old Dimple Kapadia, in her debut as the title character in Raj Kapoor’s Bobby, wore a knotted polka-dotted blouse with a short skirt, and the look became a sensation among teenage girls across the country.

What made the outfit radical for its time was the silhouette as much as the print. A cropped, front-knotted top paired with a short flared skirt was a sharp departure from the modest salwar-kameez and saree silhouettes dominating Indian screens through the 1960s. Kapadia’s performance established her as a youth fashion icon overnight, and the film’s commercial success meant the look reached far beyond metro cinemas into small-town India. Decades later, the print is still marketed as “Bobby print” in Indian textile and garment stores, a rare instance of a costume literally renaming a pattern in popular vocabulary.

Bunty aur Babli (2005): The collared kurta 🔗

Three decades after Bobby, costume designer Aki Narula did something similar with traditional wear. For Rani Mukerji’s character in Bunty Aur Babli, he created vibrant, shirt-collared short kurtas paired with equally bright Patiala salwars, worn with a dupatta tied cross-body rather than draped in the conventional style.

The styling mattered because it reframed how young audiences saw the traditional salwar-kameez-dupatta ensemble. Instead of reading as formal or old-fashioned, the collared kurta felt playful and street-smart. The bold, colourful styling matched the character’s vivacious personality and sparked a major fashion trend across India once the film released. Small-town markets and college-town tailoring shops began replicating the “Babli suit” almost immediately, with the collar detail becoming the single most copied element. It’s a useful case study for design students: a small structural change, a collar borrowed from menswear, was enough to make a centuries-old garment feel new again.

Jab We Met (2007): The boho chic wave 🔗

If Bunty Aur Babli reworked traditional wear, Jab We Met blended it with global bohemian style. Costume designer Manish Malhotra dressed Kareena Kapoor’s character, Geet, in long printed T-shirts worn over Patiala salwars, finished with Punjabi juttis and a sling bag, or jhola.

The combination worked because it read as effortless rather than styled. A long T-shirt is casual western wear; Patiala pants and juttis are rooted in Punjabi tradition. Mixing them created a hybrid silhouette that felt youthful and low-maintenance, exactly the “boho chic” aesthetic that was gaining ground globally at the time. College campuses across India picked up the combination almost as fast as the film’s soundtrack topped the charts, and the Rajasthani-print sling bag became a wardrobe staple for young women well into the following decade.

Period epics: Reviving heritage craft on screen 🔗

While contemporary films inspired everyday street style, Hindi cinema’s period dramas took on a different responsibility: historical accuracy. Two films from Sanjay Leela Bhansali, a decade apart, show how far costume designers went to make the past believable.

Bajirao Mastani (2015) 🔗

For this 18th-century Maratha saga, designer Anju Modi spent close to a year and a half on research before designing a single costume. She told The Tribune that she travelled through Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and parts of South India, studying miniature paintings and museum archives to understand what Peshwa-era royalty actually wore. Rather than replicating history literally, Modi adapted it for the screen. For Deepika Padukone’s character, she chose lighter, diaphanous fabric over the heavier textiles Peshwa women historically wore, embroidering it with gota patti to keep the look graceful and camera-friendly while still rooted in regional craft. The result won her the Filmfare Award for Best Costume Design.

Padmaavat (2018) 🔗

Designer duo Rimple and Harpreet Narula faced an even harder brief: dressing 13th-century royalty from four different provinces with almost no surviving visual record to draw from. As they explained on their official studio page, they had to identify plausible period elements and deliberately strip away later Mughal and European influences to arrive at what they called a “pure zone” for the characters. Their research took them through old manuscripts, traveller accounts, and even antique textile samples collected from markets abroad. The team used organic fabrics, hand embroidery, heavier silks, and zari work to build a sense of 13th-century opulence, and the film’s costumes are still referenced in fashion pedagogy as a benchmark for historical authenticity in Indian cinema.

Together, these two films demonstrate something important for design students: period costuming isn’t about copying the past exactly. It’s about researching deeply enough to make informed creative choices that serve both the story and the camera.

Iconic sarees in cinema 🔗

No discussion of Bollywood fashion is complete without the saree, and two looks from very different films show how the garment keeps reinventing itself on screen.

Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994) 🔗

Madhuri Dixit’s purple saree in the song “Didi Tera Devar Deewana” remains one of the most recreated bridal-function looks in India even today. Designed by costume designer Ana Singh, the ensemble reportedly cost around ₹1.5 million at the time, a striking figure for a single film costume in the early 1990s. Its embellished blouse with a distinctive front knot and heavy zardozi work turned a fairly traditional silhouette into something aspirational, and the look is still sold as a bridal replica by boutiques decades later.

Devdas (2002) 🔗

For Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s climactic scene as Paro, costume designer Neeta Lulla worked with sarees that ran twelve to fourteen metres long, layering them for dramatic weight on screen. In a later interview, Lulla recalled that the director wanted the pallu to catch fire for emotional effect, which meant she had to cut and stitch together two or three sarees overnight to get the desired drape and movement. The double saree-and-shawl draping style she created became closely associated with grand, festive dressing in Indian weddings well after the film’s release, proving that even a single, dramatically staged scene can shift how a garment is worn in real life.

Why these trends still matter for fashion students 🔗

Looking across these examples, a pattern emerges. The most influential Bollywood looks rarely invented something entirely new. Instead, they took an existing garment, be it a skirt, a kurta, a saree, or a T-shirt, and altered one or two elements enough to make it feel current. Polka dots existed before Bobby. Kurtas existed before Bunty Aur Babli. What changed was silhouette, colour, or styling context, and that small shift was enough to trigger mass adoption. For anyone studying fashion design, these case studies are a reminder that costume design for film operates at the intersection of storytelling, historical research, and street-level trend forecasting all at once.

What do you think? Which of these looks do you think would still work as everyday wear today, and which feel firmly tied to their era?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_(1973_film)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimple_Kapadia_filmography
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunty_Aur_Babli
4. https://www.utsavpedia.com/bollywood-beyond/when-fashion-met-kareena-kapoor-in-jab-we-met/
5. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/trends/queen-of-the-costumes-139847/
6. https://scroll.in/reel/933056/deepika-padukones-gorgeous-robes-in-bajirao-mastani-and-nine-other-iconic-bollywood-costumes
7. https://www.rimpleandharpreet.com/pages/padmavat-movie
8. https://www.bollywoodhungama.com/news/features/madhuri-dixit-gracefully-rekindles-nostalgia-iconic-purple-saree-hum-aapke-hain-koun/
9. https://english.loktej.com/article/19298/neeta-lulla-reveals-behind-the-scenes-challenges-of-devdas%E2%80%99-climax-saree-design