Fashion Look Book: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan at Cannes

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We have seldom been kind about Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s sartorial choices at Cannes (see here and here). This is because her stylists or whichever minions L’Oreal charges with making her red carpet-ready tend to favour fashion first and Rai second, putting her in awkward ensembles that only succeeded in fugifying a woman often called the most beautiful in the world. Perplexingly, in a year when Rai has come under bizarrely cruel fire for being heavy post-baby, she actually looks her best so far at the film festival. Could it be that Rai simply doesn’t care? That she realised the value in ditching possibly her stylist and the big-name designers who may have demanded of her body things it simply couldn’t do? Either way, we love the first look, a loose-fitting kaftan by relatively little-known Australian designer Angelo Katsapis, worn with a wavy hairstyle, new mamma glow and all.

The second look, which she chose for amfAR’s gala dinner, came courtesy of couture designers Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla—an extravagantly embroidered chiken-work sari with a long-sleeved, multi-coloured zardozi blouse. Though Rai at long last gets her hair and make-up just right, we’re feeling all sorts of hate towards this ensemble. The designer duo, in a press release, gushed, “We want Aishwarya to wear the entire spectrum of Indian couture!”. Which they’ve ably executed by throwing in every Indian embroidery style from the Mughal era onwards. Sadly, in trying to be too many things—Is it a sari? A salwar? A bandhgala, perhaps?—the outfit only manages to weigh down Rai and add a decade to her age. What was wrong with putting her in a straight-up sari, draped the way many a pregnant woman often thank the sartorial gods for? To see both looks, click the “view slideshow” button, above.