Karan Johar & The 'Luxe' Factor

Storyteller & Visualiser Extraordinaire

- Sangeeta Waddhwani

While We Know Words Never Fail Him, Few Have Acknowledged His Gift For Visual Storytelling As The 'x' Factor Of His Success Story. An Impassioned Aesthete, Be It His Movie Sets And Costumes, His Globe-trotting Wardrobe, Or His High-gloss Chat Shows And Ott Webseries, Kjo's Entire Universe Is An Exploration Of Style. Hello! Gets Chatting With The Multihyphenate About The Shadows That Hit B-town, Why Southern Films Are Conquering Hearts, Where The New Silver Linings Are... And More!

For some people, life is a rapid-fire round. But for Karan Johar, time management and creativity go hand in hand. We watch as the multitalented film producer, writer, designer, and talk show F host dives right into his looks, a nod here, a twist there. And voila! From high-street to geek chic, he makes it all look like a bizarre mix of confidence and choreography because the language of the camera is his 'dharma', one could say.

KJo is also an insatiable sybarite. His stylist of the last three or four years, Eka Lakhani, has gone on record to say, "The only challenge, honestly, is that he's more updated than I am! So I have to keep up with every new season, new launches, new trends! It's like a personal victory for me if I show him a designer or brand's new collection before he's seen it already." With Karan, we are talking three decades of reinventing mainstream culture. In the 90s, yours truly remembers bumping into his pal Manish Malhotra shopping for high-street looks at London's Oxford Street for Dharma Productions' first 'campus' film-Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Casual global chic became the new normal for Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol and Rani Mukerji. KJo calls it "a collaborative effort". "KJo X Manish-we are like a Gucci X Addidas collab."