This article analyzes some Hindi film remakes using the overlooked component of film costume. Costuming in Devdas, Don, and Om Shanti Om can be read as a strategic effort to situate each film along with its predecessors in a new vision of the industry’s past and present. Since the early 1990s, India has been transformed by economic policies that have nurtured the growth of capitalism. Consumerism is celebrated in film at the same time, as filmmaking itself is undergoing structural change. Costume plays a critical role in these processes, operating in remakes to appropriate elements of each film’s forerunners in ways that illustrate the new film’s superiority. The case studies presented here illustrate how this is done: costumes are readily translatable into the commoditized clothing that is part of the new consumerism: they signal high production values; they are complicit in the construction of contemporary stardom; and they embody “professionalism” via the employment of well-connected fashion designers. At the same time, by illustrating the limits of masquerade or by reconfiguring the dilemmas of modernity as a myth, costume assists in the projection of themes that are more conservative than those of each film’s forerunners.
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