Rekha was right, it is fashionable to wear sindoor

Some accessories need a handbag budget. Some need a fashion-week invite. And some need one chutki of crimson and the audacity to leave it in your hair parting.

My favourite thing about sindoor is that it never asks permission. For generations it was a quiet little line of paperwork, a marital status update you wore on your head. Then Rekha showed up, and it became a statement.

Let’s go back to 1980. Rekha arrives at Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh’s wedding with sindoor on, and the room loses its mind. Her explanation? She came straight from a film shoot and forgot to wash it off. Sure, Rekha. And I forgot my own birthday last year. Then 1982 happens. Receiving her National Award for ‘Umrao Jaan’, she is asked about it by the President of India himself. Her reply is a masterclass in saying nothing and everything, in the city she comes from, it’s fashionable to wear sindoor.

Fashionable. Not sacred, not scandalous. Fashionable. She turned the whole conversation into a styling choice and walked away.

In 1990 she briefly married industrialist Mukesh Agarwal, and was widowed months later. Tradition has a very clear script for what happens to the sindoor then. Rekha read the script, politely declined, and kept the red. Decades on, she still wears it, and the rumours still swirl (Amitabh Bachchan’s name is always in the room), but neither has ever confirmed a word. She doesn’t explain. She just glows. Mystery is the best accessory, and she’s been wearing it for forty years.

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Because of her, sindoor became a mood. Shanti Priya in ‘Om Shanti Om’ gave us the dialogue that is now permanent cultural furniture, “ek chutki sindoor ki keemat”.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Aditi Rao Hydari have put that little red flourish on international red carpets, and the cameras did what cameras do. It was the highlight of the look, every time.

And now, the kids are taking it somewhere wild.

At Paris Fashion Week, Matières Fécales sent out a collection built on the childhood and life of designer Steven Raj Bhaskaran. His mother and sister walked in wearing stark red sindoor on white-painted faces. Ghostly. Ceremonial. A little unsettling, in the best way. Nobody in that room needed a Wikipedia entry to feel the weight of it. This wasn’t costume. It was family.

It isn’t even the first time. Back in 2023, Prabal Gurung had models sporting the powder in different colours for his Fall/Winter collection, proving that the vermilion doesn’t have to stay vermilion.

Then came KATSEYE’s Lara Raj at the Loewe showcase, wearing kumkum as an accessory and a reminder of her Indian heritage. Subverting tradition while saluting the woman who made it possible: Rekha herself. That’s the full circle, babes. A global pop girl in a Spanish luxury house pays homage to an Indian icon with a pinch of powder.

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Notice what links all of them. Nobody is asking whether they’re allowed. Rekha never did. The sindoor stopped being a rule and started being a choice. The brides still wear it, beautifully, and the baddies are wearing it too, on runways, on red carpets, on faces painted white for the sake of art.

Sindoor has been through the mandap, the movies, the museum and now Paris. It’s still going.

Happy birthday, Rekha. Fashion is finally catching up with you.