images credits(abplive.com)
Shekhar Kapur’s film ‘Mr. India’, released in 1987, is still one of the favorite films of the audience. While Anil Kapoor and Sridevi played the lead roles, Amrish Puri won everyone’s heart with his powerful acting as Mogambo. His villain character is still alive in people’s memories.
Today we are going to tell you the interesting story of Mr. India’s Mogambo costume making, which took 7 days to make and the designer also charged a huge fee.
How Mogambo’s iconic look was created
Mogambo’s iconic look in Mr. India was created by famous designer Madhav Agasti. Madhav has told the story behind this in detail in his book Stitching Stardom: For Icons, On and Offscreens. He wrote, the film’s director Shekhar Kapoor and producer Boney Kapoor have come to my shop. He has told me that he has to prepare the costume of such a villain, which will reflect the style of both a foreign dictator and a local landlord.
For this, we did a lot of research on foreign newspapers, magazines and film history books. Took out all the cuttings from them and then went and set the design of Mogambo’s costume. In this, a coat with golden monogram print on a black color coat, long frilled shirt and long boot type shoes were used. In this way Amrish Puri’s Mogambo costume was ready.
Mogambo costume ready in 7 days
It took 7 days to complete it and I charged around Rs 25,000 as fees. But Boney Kapoor was very happy after seeing the sample of my workmanship and he gave me another Rs 10,000 as a reward. In this way, I got a total of Rs 35 thousand for making Mogambo’s costume.
This was Amrish Puri’s reaction
In his book, Madhav Agasti has further mentioned and told how Amrish Puri reacted when he saw Mogambo’s costume for the first time. He wrote- For the look test of Amrish Puri Sahab, he was made to wear the Mogambo costume made by me. He was looking very fabulous in that look and after wearing it, the only thing that came out of Puri Saheb’s mouth was – Mogambo was happy.
