From Dev.D to Gangs of Wasseypur, How Anurag Kashyap Turns Costume Design Into Character Psychology

There is a reason you remember how someone made you feel before you remember what they were wearing. Fashion, in real life and on screen, operates largely through the subconscious. Psychologists call this “enclothed cognition”—the idea that clothing doesn’t just signal identity outwardly; it shapes the inner experience of the person wearing it, as well as the emotional perception of those observing them .A person in mismatched, restless clothing reads as unstable before a single word is exchanged. Someone dressed with rigid consistency feels controlled—or controlling.

Most films use costume as information. They dress characters to be decoded: the villain appears in darker tones, the romantic lead in something aspirational, and so on. What Anurag Kashyap does is fundamentally different. He dresses characters to be felt. The clothes in his films are never decorative, and they are rarely meant to be noticed.

Kashyap has directed over 25 feature and short films and is widely regarded as an experimental voice in the Indian film industry. His work carries a distinct signature in its soundtracks, colour palettes, and dialogues, yet fashion often slips into the background. Audiences may not recall specific outfits, but they remember how the films made them feel—and that is precisely what sets his work apart. He has an uncanny ability to play with the psychology of fashion, almost too well.

In Dev.D (2009), fashion becomes deliberately kitsch—bright colours, low-grade fabrics, and mismatched looks that feel oddly intentional. Dev’s styling (played by Abhay Deol) is striking but never cohesive. He drifts between moods, cities, substances, and women, constantly searching but never finding stability. The colours feel less like vibrancy and more like noise; visually, the eye is never allowed to rest. The styling quietly reinforces a character who lacks clarity, constantly undermining any moment where he might appear in control. In contrast, the women in the film are dressed like they know who they are—grounded and self-assured, even within the same chaotic palette.

Still from the film Dev.d

No Smoking (2007), starring John Abraham and Ayesha Takia, takes the opposite approach. Here, fashion operates through repetition and control. Clothing choices are sharp, restrained, and almost mechanical—mirroring the psychological rigidity of the film itself. The repetition in K’s wardrobe becomes part of the narrative tension, subtly reinforcing the film’s central horror without ever stating it outright.

Stills from the film No Smoking

In another instance, in the film That Girl With The Yellow Boots (2010), the boots play, as the name suggests, a big role. In a film that is deliberately drab and texturally heavy, the protagonist’s yellow boots are the only persistent burst of colour. They are not fashionable in an aspirational sense, but they are impossible to ignore. Across his films, Kashyap uses clothing as a direct extension of a character’s psychological state. Each story explores a different relationship between self-perception and what clothing quietly reveals.

From the film That Girl In Yellow Boots

Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) offers yet another register—closer to documentary realism. The clothing tracks time itself: from handloom roughness to synthetic fabrics, from earthy tones to the loud prints of post-liberalisation small-town India. You can read the political economy of a region through the cut of a collar or the sheen of a shirt. Synthetic fabrics, specific silhouettes, and aggressive colour choices become markers of a particular era. This is not nostalgia. It is anthropology.

Stills from the film Gangs of Wasseypur

Over the years, Kashyap has used costume to anchor a character within the economic and cultural realities of their world. It tells us that this person exists in a specific social, economic and cultural moment, and their body reflects that reality. This is what separates costume as anthropology from costume as aesthetic. This is precisely why enclothed cognition works, not because we are consciously reading clothes, but because we aren't. We absorb them. And Kashyap's films operate on exactly that frequency.

Much of Indian cinema dresses its characters to make them appealing or to signal a genre. Kashyap's costumes do something far less comfortable: they root the character in their own world. The clothes carry the weight of where someone comes from, what they can afford and the circumstances they are living through. They become an integral part of the storytelling.

It might be fair to say that Anurag Kashyap's films always get the clothes right. Not in the way fashion editorials do—polished or aspirational—but in a way that is much harder to achieve: they feel true.