Sonakshi Sinha reveals she knew instantly she’d marry Zaheer

Bollywood’s most stylish designer and its sassiest star are spilling secrets, swapping laughs and serving looks this week on Prime Video’s ‘Two Much With Kajol and Twinkle’. Manish Malhotra and Sonakshi Sinha get real about first encounters, fashion fumbles and fairytale love, all stitched together with honesty, nostalgia and unfiltered fun.

Manish’s journey with fashion began through his love for cinema: “I was born interested in movies. At the age of six, I wanted to dance to every song and I was interested in clothes. One thing, I have to give it to my mother; she encouraged my love of films. I wanted to change the way films look. Because, in the late 1980s, movies had stopped looking good. All the stars in the 1970s were so stylish. From Rajesh Khanna’s kurtas to Amit Ji’s collars, Zeenat Aman and all of them. But in the late 1980s, I think that was missing. I was determined that I would only design for movies and I’ll always be a costume designer. So, that’s how films happened.”

Sonakshi revealed she knew Zaheer was ‘the one’ almost instantly, “When I saw him, it was an instant click. I just knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this guy. In a month, I told him, ‘I’m going to marry you only’ and then seven years later, we did get married.” Taking a ‘no stylist’ approach to her wedding look, she explained, “This is always a vision that I’ve had for myself. I wanted to be something that I can remember for the rest of my life. So, I said, ‘You know what, I’ll wear my mom’s sari’. And I went to my mom and I told her, ‘Ma, just show me your saris’. Within five minutes, I selected the sari that I wore, which was a beautiful ‘chikankari’, off-white sari.”

Sonakshi admitted that acting wasn’t part of the plan, but once she began, she knew she was meant for it. “Growing up, I never wanted to be an actor. So, when I became an actor, the gold standard was that ‘Until you don’t wear Manish Malhotra’s clothes, you won’t be successful’. So, he styled me for ‘Rowdy Rathore’, which is a film I did with Akshay.”

She credited Akshay and her ‘Son of Sardaar’ co-star Ajay for her on-set discipline, “I learned how to be on time from Akshay. Ajay is so quick with everything that he’s doing, like there’s no nonsense in the middle of a set. Everything is like quick, quick, quick.”