Manish Malhotra (born 5 December 1966) is an Indian fashion designer, couturier, costume stylist, entrepreneur, filmmaker, revivalist based in Mumbai, India.
The founder of the eponymous label, Manish Malhotra, he has been deeply entrenched in the twin worlds of fashion and film for the past three decades. He has styled and designed for more than thousands of movies and won numerous awards. He is known for redefining and modernizing how actors look in Indian films and reviving some of the country's forgotten crafts.
The recipient of several awards, Malhotra rose to prominence for his elaborate work in cinema with Bollywood, Telugu, Tamil, Hollywood, Television, and the Fashion industry.
Malhotra became famous for his outlook on the importance of costumes in films, often becoming a part of the narration and script reading process to develop costumes for films.
Malhotra has been felicitated with Priyadarshini Memorial Award for his contribution to the fashion industry. Filmfare introduced the Filmfare Award for Best Costume Design in 1996 to acknowledge Malhotra for his styling and designing work in the film Rangeela (1995).
Since 2018, Manish has launched four other new verticals - Manish Malhotra Beauty, Manish Malhotra Jewellery, a Film Production company, and Home decor.
He is set to make his directorial debut with a musical love story, set against the backdrop of the partition, produced by Dharma Productions.
Accoladed as a pioneer in the Indian design space, Malhotra's areas of creativity span the broad spheres of cinema, design, styling, diffusion, timeless bridal couture, jewelry, beauty, film direction, virtual store, and now tech with his recent launch of NFT's in the blockchain business.
Early life
Manish Malhotra was born to a Punjabi family in Mumbai, India. He studied at the Sacred Heart Boys High School, Mumbai.
Growing up, he was heavily influenced by Bollywood films – the songs, the storytelling, the colors, the costumes, the actors who adorned them and made it a point to watch every film which released in cinemas. As he had a knack for sketching, he joined a painting class in the tenth grade as per his brother's suggestion.
From watching films, painting, being surrounded by mother's clothes, recreating her sarees, being strongly opinionated about his family's sartorial choices, his love for fashion, styling, and cinema grew.
While studying Arts at Elphinstone College in Mumbai, Manish was 19 when he forayed into modeling ad campaigns for brands like Fu's, Weekender, Frooti, and Goldspot. He managed to save Rs 90,000 through his modeling gigs and flew to Bangkok and Singapore in a quest to explore the world.
On his return at the onset, he joined a boutique in Bandra called Equinox, where he spent his time sketching and draping the mannequins for a year, which paid him lower than 500 Indian rupees per month.
In 1987, he decided to hire two tailors and started taking customized couture orders from his house. He wished to showcase his collection at Ensemble but didn't have the monetary means to create them at that point in time.
In 1989, he was offered a chance to style the celebrated actress Divya Bharti in a song sequence for a film by David Dhawan. However, the film was later shelved.
Though he did not have a formal education in fashion design, Malhotra's love for sketching, painting, and his passion for cinema and clothes saw him veer towards the world of films and styling. He debuted in the Hindi Film Industry as a costume stylist in 1990. Since then, Malhotra has dressed an entire generation of Bollywood actors and their progeny on-screen while also extending his aesthetics with his private label.
He describes his Bollywood forte as "an entire, integrated look for a character throughout a film."
Career
Stylist and designer
Malhotra made his costume designing debut with the film Swarg (1990), starring Rajesh Khanna, Govinda and Juhi Chawla.
The same year, his gateway to the fashion industry opened when Rakesh Sreshtha, a photographer, introduced him to the late Sridevi to style her photoshoot looks.
His creative process as a costume stylist began with script readings – an unheard-of practice in Hindi films then. He believed that costumes were an integral part of visual storytelling to make the characters more relatable to the audience.
Malhotra was known to be the first costume stylist and designer to view the film as a whole. He advised the actresses and filmmakers on aspects where the character's look would just be a subset of the overall creative input, lending the costume looks their due credit.