There’s a song in , the 1993 Yash Chopra-produced megahit, where Juhi Chawla peacocks about the pool in a shocking swimsuit. The colour, mind you, isn't what’s shocking. “You have to zoom in to find it,” deadpans Neeta Lulla.
“I mean, really zoom in.” By “it”, she means her logo, which, at no more than a fingernail , has taken me twenty attempts and my toddler’s toy microscope to locate. “It was a dare,” continues the 4-time National Award-winning couturier and designer, whose 400-film-strong, 40-year-long curriculum vitae—if she had such a thing—would be headlined by such blockbusters as , and .
“Yash wasn’t sure if I could make it. He said, ‘What if you can't?’. I said, ‘What if I can?’.
” She presented the producer with a caveat: if she did, the garment would have her logo. He approved, and then approved again when she presented him the final piece a few weeks later. There's something disarmingly irreverent about Neeta Lulla.
She's dressed in a brown flannel shirt, hair down, her fringe grazing the top of her eyebrows. And though we’re separated by a screen (she’s in Mumbai, I’m in New Delhi), I can sense an abiding placidity. She adjusts her tortoiseshell glasses before continuing, “I never aspired to be a designer.
I wasn’t interested in studies so I married at sixteen, had a baby soon after, and enrolled in a course at SNDT to pass my time.” But films were written in her long before she knew it. “I remember seeing the.