The ink lotus appliqué kurta set

This one is not a costume. Keerthy Suresh wore it to a showroom appearance — she walks in, is photographed with the staff, and is presented with a silk shawl — and nothing in it comes from a film. We have not named the occasion, because we could not establish it: the signage behind her is Kannada and the staff polo logo does not resolve at the resolution the footage exists in, and we would rather leave a gap than guess a shop.

What we can name is the outfit, exactly. It is Vaayu’s “Ink Floral Applique Kurta Set”, listed on the label’s own site at ₹14,825 including taxes and, checked the day this page was written, available in every size from XS to XXL — made to order, shipped in two to three weeks. Vaayu is a Kolkata label working with weavers and craftspeople across India, and the brand’s own copy describes the set as three pieces of muslin cotton: an appliquéd kurta, matching pants with an embroidered hem, and a contrasting printed dupatta with tassels. Everything written below was read off frozen frames before that copy was opened, and the two agree.

The kurta is a deep ink navy, straight-cut and long, with a small keyhole neck closed by a loop and three-quarter sleeves whose upper half is a sheer organza in the same navy — in the showroom light you can see the shape of her arm through it. Across the plain ground, three motifs repeat and nothing else: a salmon lotus worked as an appliqué, its petals fanned and its centre veined in dark thread with a raw, blanket-stitched edge you can see the stitches of; a small scalloped rosette in olive-mustard, outlined twice and dotted in its middle; and thin sprigs of pale teal leaves on fine stems. They sit sparsely, scattered, with a lot of empty navy between them. That sparseness is the whole character of the piece, and it is the thing almost nothing on the high street does — printed navy florals come dense.

Under it, matching navy pants, straight through the leg and plain except at the hem, where a scalloped band is embroidered in a pale ice blue. It only shows in the full-length frame, an inch or two above her flat sandals, and it is the detail that confirms which Vaayu set this is.

The dupatta is a dusty rose — muted, closer to a faded salmon than to pink — printed all over with a fine tonal ring-and-dot motif in a slightly deeper shade of itself, with a scalloped edge. She wears it folded long and thrown over the left shoulder, hanging down the front and back, with a tan crossbody strap running across it.

Four things are deliberately not on the list. The tan crossbody bag, the gold watch on her left wrist, the thin gold bangle beside it and the jhumka-drop earrings are all clearly there and none of them ever resolves enough to name a make, so none of them is here. Guessing any one of them would be the fastest way to make the rest of this page untrustworthy.

Below you will find the real set first, with the brand's own listing and its real price, and then one pick of our own. Only one, and that is deliberate. The outfit is three garments, but the difficult one is the dupatta: a muted dusty rose in a fine tonal print. The high street’s pinks are bright cerise or sheer sequinned blush, and every candidate we checked was one or the other. The set we have picked carries all three garments in the right palette in a single purchase, which is also the only way to be sure the two navys agree with each other. It is our own pick to match the look, not her garment — the note on the card says exactly where it differs.