Movie Review: Fashion

The story of Madhur Bhandarkar's 'Fashion' begins in Chandigarh when Meghna Mathur (Priyanka Chopra) decides to come to Mumbai for becoming a supermodel. She happens to the suave Abhijit Sarin (Arbaaz Khan), who gets her to the fashion industry in Mumbai. He favours her with plenty of praises and flirts with her, despite of being married to Avantika Sarin (Suchithra Pillai). He even makes her the showstopper for the gay designer Vinay Khosla (Harsh Chhaya). In a few scene, we end up meeting the psychotic Kangana Ranaut as the falling model Sonali Gujral who tells Meghna that there'll be no one to pick her up when she falls. Kangana deserves a special mention for her confidence specially while enacting the scene of the infamous Carol Gracias wardrobe malfunction.

Due to the falling nature of Sonali and the complaints, Meghna replaces Sonali as the new face of PANACHE, a company owned by Abhijit Sarin. The parallel lead role of top model Janet Stevens (Mugdha Godse) blends into the main story like a dream. It even shows the gay designer played by Sameer Soni getting married to Janet only because of parental pressure.

With each of the three actresses getting powerful writer-backed roles, each of them does their best. Competition doesn't seem to exist and Priyanka radiates tremendous power along with awesome spunk in playing the role of Meghna Mathur. Her confidence is evidently seen in the scene when Kittu Gidwani asks her in Hindi, "so, you have come here to become a model?" Meghna replies in a negative and says, "supermodel". In the later part of the movie, Priyanka says with so much attitude filled in her, "I don't need Panache, Panache needs me". The next morning, she is replaced with an upcoming model Gauri as the face of Panache.

Slowly, we see the fall-from-grace story of Meghna Mathur and she returning to Chandigarh, heartbroken. Upon returning to Mumbai a year later, she managed to get an assignment in which she walks and freezes on stage. Parallels could be drawn with the supermodel Shivani Kapoor. The most amazing part is that Madhur has really made Priyanka act and she doesn't look plastic on screen.

She emanates tremendous grace in walking like a real-life model (specially in the Mar Javaa song). Mugdha, a model in real life as well, is nothing less than the superstar of tomorrow. She too deserves to share the trophy for the Best Actress with Priyanka. It is really commendable that he managed to unite people like Karan Johar, Diandra Soares, Manish Malhotra, Rohit Bal, Konkona Sen Sharma, Ranvir Shorey and even fitness guru Leena Mogre in passing shots. All in all, a movie worth investing your money and time in, not because it is artistic cinema but because it doesn't expect you to be brain-dead.