Alia Bhatt Revisits Her Life in Looks, From Preppy Beginnings to Her Chai-Dipped Wedding Sari

“I truly thrive in this sort of chaos,” Alia Bhatt told Vogue a few months ago, when we saw her on the Croisette at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, “[and] the chaos always tends to find us.” Now, we find the Heart of Stone and Jigra actor in a calmer, more reflective format as she sits down to review her Life in Looks.

Bhatt begins with some reminiscing—and a gasp. The first look is from a press conference for her very first film, Student of the Year (2012), where she sported a pink-piped navy blazer, a white mini-dress, and a matching Alice band. “I do not recognize this human being,” she says. Press-tour method dressing wasn’t much of a thing in the 2010s, but Bhatt’s brief was to channel her character, which meant lots of preppy tailoring and cutesy hair accessories. “All I remember was nerves!” she admits.

Next comes her 2017 Vogue India cover, shot by Greg Swales and styled by Anaita Shroff Adajania. “I like this headline, ‘What makes Alia Bhatt the coolest girl in Bollywood?’—I like to be known as cool!” says Bhatt.

Onward to the 2017 film Badrinath Ki Dulhania, in which we see her perform the “Tamma Tamma” dance—an iconic, high-energy Bollywood routine. Bhatt wears a simple costume—jeans, a jacket, and a graphic tee—to dance alongside her co-star Varun Dhawan, a longtime collaborator. “You don’t make that [kind of friendship] every day,” Bhatt remarks.

Up next: the 2018 Lux Golden Rose Awards. It was one of her busiest years as a working actor, with multiple films in production, and she wore her hair in soft Hollywood waves with strong winged eyeliner and a white corseted Netta BenShabu gown. Then came the wedding of Bhatt’s dear friend and fellow actor Sonam Kapoor, where Bhatt wore a brilliant lime-green lehenga by Sabyasachi Mukherjee—a bold color choice for her. “It was the beginning of my journey,” she says of gravitating toward more statement–making looks that also spoke to her Indian identity.

Her style story continues with equally high-octane looks. There’s the cream suit splashed with zigzagging orange stripes that she picked for the 2019 premiere of Gully Boy at the Berlin International Film Festival; a diaphanous white couture sari by Rimple & Harpreet Narula for the 2022 premiere of Gangubai Kathiawadi, featuring intricate embroidery, jaali work, pearls, and sequins; and, for her wedding to Ranbir Kapoor, Bhatt’s chai-dipped white-and-gold Sabyasachi sari, embroidered with an inside joke and accessorized with a traditional Indian head ornament known as a maang tikka. Then, for Bhatt and Kapoor’s godh bharai—a traditional Indian baby shower and ritual to pray for the well-being of a mother and baby—she wore a custom mango-yellow Raji Ramniq outfit, along with jewelry gifted by her mother-in-law.