Inside Anshula Kapoor's ITRH Bridal Look: The Story Behind a 1,600-Hour Ensemble
Some outfits are worn once and photographed. Others are worn once and remembered. Anshula Kapoor's Mata Ki Chowki look, worn for the opening ceremony of her pre-wedding festivities ahead of her July 6th wedding to Rohan Thakkar, belongs firmly to the second category - and we happen to know exactly why, because we made it.
This is the story of that ensemble: the gold lehenga, the Phulkari dupatta thrown over one shoulder, and the 1,600 hours of handwork that went into every inch of it before it ever touched a camera.
The Evening It Was Worn
The Kapoor family's celebrations opened with a Mata Ki Chowki - a devotional evening of prayer, bhajans, and blessings that traditionally marks the beginning of pre-wedding festivities in many North Indian households. Set against an idol of Goddess Durga, surrounded by three generations of the Kapoor family, it was an intimate ceremony before the wider wedding spectacle to come.
It was into this setting that Anshula stepped in a custom ITRH ensemble, designed by Ridhi Bansal and styled in its entirety by Mohit Rai. Within hours, it was the single most talked-about look from the evening.
What Went Into the Look
The foundation of the ensemble was a champagne-gold lehenga skirt built from Banarasi silk tissue brocade - a fabric chosen deliberately for the way it holds and reflects light, giving the piece a quality closer to sculpture than cloth. Onto this base, our artisans layered ghungroo detailing, mirror work, polki embellishment, and dense zardozi embroidery, finished with antique-gold dabka, badla, and gota work for texture and depth.
The blouse carried the intensity further - a high-neck silhouette, entirely covered in oversized polki stones and beadwork, designed to catch light with the smallest movement. Every embellishment on the ensemble was placed by hand, which is precisely why an outfit like this cannot be rushed. From first stitch to final finish, the piece took our atelier close to 1,600 hours to complete.
And then, over one shoulder, came the detail that turned a beautiful lehenga into a deeply personal one: a vividly hand-embroidered Phulkari dupatta, worked in crimson, emerald, orange, and fuchsia, its colour deliberately set against the muted, metallic gold of the rest of the ensemble.
Why the Phulkari Dupatta Mattered
Phulkari is centuries-old Punjabi embroidery, traditionally hand-worked by women onto cotton khaddar using a darning stitch, thread by counted thread, with no stencils and no shortcuts. For generations, it has held a specific place in Punjabi bridal tradition - often gifted by a grandmother to a bride, or embroidered for her over years by the women in her family.
Anshula chose to bring that tradition, quite literally, into her own wedding story. In a note she shared alongside photographs from the evening, she explained that wearing a Phulkari dupatta felt especially meaningful for the occasion, describing it as a celebration of heritage, craftsmanship, and the blessings passed down through generations of Punjabi women. It's a sentence that says, better than we could, exactly why we build our own bridal work around textiles like this one.
For a family as widely watched as the Kapoors, choosing to centre a regional heritage textile - rather than defaulting to a purely embellishment-led bridal formula - was a quiet but deliberate statement. It told a more personal story than sequins alone ever could.
The Craft Behind the Camera
What audiences saw was a few minutes of beautifully lit photographs. What actually sat behind those photographs was months of work inside our atelier: pattern development, fabric sourcing, hand embroidery carried out in stages across multiple artisan teams, and continuous fittings to make sure a piece this heavily worked still moved the way bridal wear needs to move - through an aarti, through touching an elder's feet for blessings, through hours of standing, sitting, and dancing.
This is, honestly, the least visible and most important part of couture bridal work. A lehenga can be striking in a photograph and still be uncomfortable to actually get married in. Ours had to do both - hold up under 1,600 hours of embellishment while still feeling wearable for a woman moving through one of the most emotionally significant evenings of her life.
A Family Affair, Told Through Fashion
Part of what made this look resonate so widely is the setting it appeared in. The Mata Ki Chowki brought together three generations of the Kapoor family - Anshula's father, producer Boney Kapoor; her brother Arjun Kapoor, present throughout the evening; her sister Janhvi Kapoor, dressed in a Banarasi saree of her own for the occasion - around a shared devotional ceremony ahead of Anshula's July wedding to Rohan Thakkar.
In a setting built entirely around family, heritage, and blessing, an ensemble anchored by a textile as steeped in generational meaning as Phulkari didn't just look beautiful. It fit the emotional register of the evening in a way that a more conventional bridal choice simply couldn't have.
Building an Ensemble Around One Meaningful Element
Every commission at this level starts with a conversation, not a mood board. Before a single thread goes into a piece like this, our design team works to understand what a bride actually wants the outfit to say - about her, her family, and the story she's stepping into.
For this ensemble, that starting point was clear early on: the Phulkari dupatta wasn't going to be an accessory layered on at the end. It was the emotional centre the rest of the outfit needed to be built around. Every choice that followed - the champagne-gold tone of the Banarasi brocade, the restraint in the blouse's colour palette against the boldness of its polki work, even the decision to let the dupatta's jewel tones stand alone rather than echoing them elsewhere in the outfit - was made in service of that one piece of fabric and everything it represented.
This is, in many ways, the difference between embellishment and storytelling in bridal couture. Anyone can add more embroidery. Building an entire 1,600-hour ensemble around a single heritage textile, and trusting it to carry the emotional weight of the evening, takes a different kind of design discipline.
A Look Built on Personal Meaning, Not Trend
What stood out most about this particular commission wasn't the scale of the embroidery, though that alone would have made headlines. It was the intention behind it. Rather than following a purely trend-led bridal formula, the brief was rooted in heritage textiles and personal significance - Anshula's own connection to her partner's family traditions, and to the broader story Punjabi Phulkari carries for the brides who choose to wear it.
That's the brief we find most rewarding to execute. Bridal couture at this level isn't simply about maximalist embellishment for its own sake. It's about identifying the one element - in this case, a Phulkari dupatta - that will carry the most emotional weight in the room, and building an entire ensemble that lets it breathe.
Why This Kind of Visibility Matters
There's a broader story worth naming here, beyond one bride and one evening. Every time a heritage craft like Phulkari appears on a widely photographed occasion, it does something quietly significant: it puts the artisans behind it back in the conversation, if only for a moment.
Phulkari embroidery has survived displacement, industrialisation, and decades of being undervalued as "just" folk craft, kept alive largely through the determination of Punjabi women who refused to let it disappear. When a piece built on that same tradition appears at a moment as watched as a Kapoor family wedding, it doesn't just make headlines. It reminds a global audience that the most compelling thing in the room wasn't the celebrity - it was six hundred years of craftsmanship, still very much alive, still worth 1,600 hours of anyone's time.
That's the story we care about telling, one ensemble at a time.
What Sets an ITRH Bridal Ensemble Apart
An outfit that takes 1,600 hours to make isn't simply the sum of its embellishment. It's the result of a process most people never see: hand-sourcing the right Banarasi brocade for how it will catch light under both daylight and evening lighting, mapping out embroidery density so a heavily worked lehenga still moves naturally, and running multiple fittings to ensure a piece built for ceremony can also be worn comfortably for hours at a stretch.
Founded by Ridhi Bansal and Mohit Rai, our house has always approached bridal couture from a similar starting point: heritage craft first, embellishment second. Zardozi, dabka, badla, gota, mirror work, and hand-embroidered textiles like Phulkari aren't treated as decorative add-ons at ITRH - they're the foundation the rest of the design is built around. It's an approach that takes longer, costs more in artisan hours, and is, in our view, entirely non-negotiable if the goal is genuinely couture bridal wear rather than heavily embellished ready-to-wear.
That philosophy is exactly why a commission like Anshula's ensemble made sense for us to take on. A bride wanting to honour her partner's family traditions through a specific regional textile isn't a styling request - it's a design brief that requires real craft knowledge, and a team willing to spend 1,600 hours getting it right.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the name of Anshula Kapoor's ITRH ensemble? The complete look is known as Anshula in Swarnali Bridal Lehenga Set, featuring a Banarasi silk tissue brocade lehenga, a hand-embroidered blouse, and a custom Phulkari dupatta.
How long did the outfit take to make? Our artisans spent close to 1,600 hours on the ensemble, covering embroidery, embellishment, and fittings.
Can I get a similar custom bridal ensemble made? Yes. Our design team regularly works with brides to build fully custom, heritage-led bridal couture around a similar process - starting with a meaningful textile or family tradition and designing the rest of the ensemble around it.
See the Full Ensemble
The complete look - the champagne-gold Banarasi lehenga, the hand-embroidered blouse, and the Phulkari dupatta that stole the evening - is available to explore as Anshula in Swarnali Bridal Lehenga Set. You can see the full craftsmanship detail here: Anshula in Swarnali Bridal Lehenga Set.
If you're currently planning your own bridal wardrobe and a piece like this speaks to you, our design team works closely with brides to translate exactly this kind of heritage-led, hand-embroidered couture into a look built around your own story - not just a trend cycle. Sixteen hundred hours is a long time to spend on one outfit. We think that's exactly the point.