The bespoke tailor to the stars

Meet Madhav Agasti, the self-taught designer who has created costumes for heroes and villains for 50 years

- Pooja Singh

Madhav Agasti designed Amrish Puri's famous Mogambo look in 'Mr. India'.

Madhav Agasti, 76, prefers to hand-sew the buttonholes of a suit at his store in Bandra, Mumbai—a practice he’s been following since he started work as a bespoke menswear tailor 50 years ago. Each buttonhole takes over an hour; a machine can do it in less than 10 seconds. The difference is that Agasti’s stitches are nearly invisible.

This attention to detail is how Madhav Agasti has made his name in men’s tailoring in the country. He's designed costumes for over 350 Hindi films, including Mr. India, Ram Lakhan, Andaz Apna Apna, Chameli Ki Shadi, Himmatwala and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, and dressed chief ministers and Presidents, including the late Pranab Mukherjee, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Farooq Abdullah and Bal Thackeray.

To mark five decades in the profession and to share his experiences along the way, Agasti has released his autobiography, Stitching Stardom: For Icons, On and Offscreen (Penguin Random House India, ₹499).

Across 150 pages, he writes of how he fell in love with the art of tailoring while watching his father, a priest in Nagpur, Maharashtra, make suits for a lawyer to earn some extra cash. Agasti dropped out of college, where he was studying for a BCom degree, in the late 1960s to move to Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, with ₹500 in hand to apprentice with a tailor and learn the trade.

Over a span of eight years, he worked with tailors in various cities, honing his skills in different styles of clothing, before making his way to Mumbai in 1973. The book touches briefly upon his experiences of designing costumes for films, many of which, like the late Amrish Puri’s outfit as Mogambo in Mr. India, became part of film history.