TV doesn’t have a styling department that works seriously and like one expects in a movie. The pay isn’t much, there are too many characters and the briefings are generic.
Stylists in movies have to be very careful because they’re given briefings about every character and their expected looks are designed in advance.
TV didn’t even have stylists until about some 20 years ago. Look at Tuhina Vohra’s post on Instagram when this season was about to launch last year. She played Prajakta on the show in the 1st season and she wrote openly that the actors carried their own costumes. It was only when the show got bigger and they had more budget that they even got a dedicated area to store their costumes and accessories which happened to be sponsored for them for the first time in their careers. The sponsors were sarees and artificial jewellery manufacturers, dealers, wholesalers and suppliers who did it to boost their own sales.
Look at the initial shows of Balaji, styling was dedicated to Nim Sood who happens to be Ekta’s Maasi. We don’t even know if the woman had any experience in fashion designing or styling professionally or has she done a course on it even. She got the job owing to nepotism, plain and simple.
The few style icons on TV have been Komolika, Ramola and Kashish. These women have been famously interviewed and their costars have also agreed that they did their styling themselves for their famous characters and had a good idea of what they wanted. Aamna has a degree in Fashion Designing I believe.
I mean look at it, if there was anyone who genuinely understood styling why would Ekta be able to dictate that Shweta Tiwari be aped as Ash from Devdas or for say, why would her heroines sometimes don questionable wardrobe choices when it makes no sense in terms of their character. For eg, Ishita is shown in YHM as a dentist - granted she’s living in a middle class family and her upbringing is modest despite having a retired government employee for a father and a homemaker for her mother. But she clearly can afford more than 5 pairs of Salwar Kameez in the beginning of the show. Once married to Raman as well, when her wardrobe shifts entirely to sarees… suddenly she goes from this girl who wore sober and simple yet elegant clothes to loud, colourful and clearly gaudy sarees. I understand that as a newlywed bride she would wear bright colours as much as possible in the initial weeks of her marriage; but why did her choices have to go from elegant to gaudy? She clearly is capable of looking beautiful without trying hard and staying true to herself, but apparently she’s supposed to be a behenji, which means her dressing sense has to suddenly suck? It doesn’t even make sense…
A stylist would have known how to convey even Ishita’s “behenjiness” without making her dress so tackily. Everyone else on the show had what looked like the same outfit in 6 different colours, that’s it.
A stylist who knows their job who is dedicated to a show solely and knows their characters will know how to make sure that everyone dresses up per the personalities of their characters as befitting the script; but not look like they bought the same cheap outfit in half a dozen different colours!
In this case though nothing can save the wreck because Aakash clearly looks his age. What he needs is botox or prosthetics or AI to look younger because styling can’t hide his wrinkles.
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