BackKatrina Kaif on the red carpet
Why the actor's Cannes look was a disappointment
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This year when news wafted out that the tall and beautiful (and slim and fair and dating Ranbir Kapoor) Katrina Kaif will walk the Cannes 2015 red carpet, a sigh of happy resignation went around. Only among those of course, who actually wait up to watch these photos being beamed out and then write on what’s already been written three hundred times. Like me. But newness helps, don’t you agree? How many times will we comment on Aishwarya, Sonam and Frieda, after all.
Secretly though, I hoped Katrina and her fashion stylist would give us reason to be pleasantly shocked, awfully surprised. In ways that we haven’t been in a long time. Would she really ramp it up with something dramatic? Would she steer all that chatter around “what the Indian girls wore at Cannes" to a completely new direction by turning up in an unpredictable red carpet look?
She didn’t. She wore a red Elie Saab and a black and grey Oscar de la Renta. Statuesque, elegant, conventionally pretty. Totally diva-like. Safe as a safety pin. Fantastic where familiar fantasies go. You cannot go wrong in one of these two couturiers (especially if you are gazelle-like as Kaif is) whose dreamy concoctions, we are constantly told, impact even how women behave and speak in those clothes.
Here’s the fashion perplexity then. A beautiful star who anyway looks great didn’t look magical on that red carpet. She looked like one of those perenially glamourous stars from Hollywood—who barring a few—look like one another. They follow age-old red carpet style—have fabulous figures, wear enviable jewels, walk on heels as high as their status and stardom allows, have been body polished and manicured to a fault and look unmemorably captivating. That’s how Kaif looked. Unmemorably beautiful. Though I must thank her for not wearing a sari to push a point.
Yet for Kaif to light a fire, she has to surpass her own beauty and try something wild and untamed. Like frizzy hair with a very short dress maybe, a pure silk clutch in hand. Like a long Indian style plait set with pearly plait jewellery with a sexy black gown. Like a Cleopatra look, unending winged black eyeliner like the late Amy Winehouse.
But she is easy, thank you—she is not even trying to light a fire. She is good as she is—I hear someone hissing in the background. Okay, okay. I am just saying that India sent a bomb to Cannes, but it just didn’t go off given the ammunition it was packed with.
Understatement is a fortnightly blog on popular culture seen through actions or words. Shefalee Vasudev is the author of Powder Room: The Untold Story of Indian Fashion.
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