The long-veiled red and white saree donned by Aishwarya Rai’s Parvati aka Paro, in the climax scene of ‘Devdas’, remains one of the iconic costumes of Bollywood. But do you know? The garment was made in less than 24 hours and reached the film’s set minutes before the shoot.
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Veteran designer Neeta Lulla, who did the costumes for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ‘Devdas’, has revealed that the filmmaker changed the attire for the climax scene, a day before the shoot, and she had to do the entire thing again, with the new details, through the night, to film the sequence the following day.
In a new interview with a YouTube channel, Lulla shared that Bhansali changed the fabric of the saree, from cotton to silk the previous evening of the shoot, and even increased the length of the garment for the visual that he wanted to create with the burning pallu.
“He told me, ‘I just visualized her [Rai] running down the stairs with her pallu burning, and I need a 15-meter-long silk saree for the flutter,” Lulla shared, and added that SLB asked for two identical sarees, just in case the first one gets burnt during filming.
“Sanjay asked me if he could shoot the next day, I said, ‘Of course’ and left the studio. This was all happening at Filmistan studio in Goregaon and it was 10:30 at night by this time,” she added.
The designer revealed that she somehow contacted the fabric vendor via a phone booth, as there used to be no mobile phones at that time, only pagers, and convinced him to open his shop at midnight.
“He came at 12-12:30 to open the shop. I got the fabric, and since I had already called my embroidery team, they had already started stitching the borders. We finished the sarees at 6 in the morning, and I reached the set at 9:30 when the shooting was planned to begin,” Lulla concluded.
One of the biggest commercial and critical successes, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s romance drama ‘Devdas’ was based on the same-titled novel by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. It starred a hit pair of then, Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai in the lead roles of Devdas and Paro respectively, while Madhuri Dixit essayed the tailored role of Chandramukhi.
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While it opened to mixed reviews from critics, the cult hit became a major commercial success emerging as the highest-grossing film of the year. It also bagged several accolades.
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