Costume designer Neha Bajaj had already wanted to work with Geethu Mohandas when the director came to her with what was, essentially, a three-word brief. There was no script, no character breakdown and little sense of the scale of the film she was mounting. All Bajaj knew was that Mohandas would direct, Rajeev Ravi would shoot and Yash was at the helm.
Then came a Zoom call in 2023.
"She was so tight-lipped about it and refused to give me anything else," Bajaj recalls. "But looking back at it, it worked out because that's how we could have our imagination run wild and build a narrative."
Mohandas gave Bajaj three clues: 1940s, mafia and... badass women.
"I went back to her with a very, very elementary level mood board because I did not know much about the characters or the backdrop," she continues.
Her visual references included Peaky Blinders and Once Upon a Time in America, but Bajaj was less interested in recreating those worlds than in understanding the women who inhabited the real one. She researched women such as Stephanie St. Clair, the Harlem-based crime boss, alongside other well-known criminals like Rosetta Cutolo and Assunta Maresca.
What struck her was that these women did not necessarily have to masculinise themselves to occupy a male-dominated world. They wore shiny fabrics and glamorous dresses instead.
That became an important starting point for Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups: femininity and power could coexist without one having to cancel the other.
The Characters
Once Bajaj officially came on board and read the script, the scale of the costume exercise became clearer. The film features a large ensemble of women, each with a distinct personality and trajectory.
"I created a specific world for each character," she reveals. Crucially, she did this before the actors were cast. That meant each character had a visual “bible” that could subsequently evolve around the actor who inhabited it.
For Kiara Advani’s Nadia, the brief was softness, romance and hope. Bajaj worked with Manish Malhotra on Nadia’s looks, using pink, red and white alongside feminine, flowing silhouettes. As a circus performer, Nadia also gets more costumey, glamorous looks.
Huma Qureshi’s Elizabeth, by contrast, is deliberately excessive. She is exuberant and theatrical, the kind of character who commands attention the moment she enters a room. The exaggerated shoulders and sleeves seen in early looks are part of that larger language.
Bajaj says, "Huma as a person also is extremely experimental, wanting to try [different things]."
Nayanthara’s Ganga, however, required an entirely different vocabulary. Her character has a powerful presence in Raya’s life without needing to announce it. So Bajaj avoided the flowing gowns and instead leaned into sharper silhouettes, clean cuts and impact.
Tara Sutaria’s Rebecca occupies yet another world: wealthy, vulnerable, brattish and deeply fashionable. Her wardrobe is built around black, leather and grunge, punctuated by vintage jewellery sourced internationally. Her wealth is not necessarily stated through ostentation, it is embedded in the details.
"She was born into money. There is a lot of power there. So, she had access to things, whatever she wanted, even if it was in the 1940s," she says.
Rukmini Vasanth’s Melissa presented a different challenge, partly because her timeline and character arc are distinct from those of the other women. Her looks were developed around both the character and Vasanth’s body type, allowing the wardrobe to evolve as the story moves forward.
That evolution is particularly important because Toxic spans decades. The film begins in the 1940s and moves towards the 1970s, with the changing fashion and visual language used as subtle markers of time.
World Building
The period world extends well beyond the principal cast. Bajaj describes a production that could have more than 200 junior artists on set on a given day, along with circus performers, mafia spaces, a jazz club and a disco. For her, those background characters are as important as the stars in establishing the period.
"When you see a visual of Tara's character walking in with 200 juniors in the background, it's them who will immediately cue the era," she explains.
Sourcing, therefore, became an long-winded exercise. Bajaj travelled within India for fabrics, embellishments, lace and materials, while trips abroad yielded vintage shoes and jewellery, particularly for Rebecca. Etsy became another source, although the logistics were not always straightforward. Hats, gloves, shoes and jewellery often had to be sourced outside India because of their period specificity.
The film also required Bajaj to work alongside costume designer Saniya Sardhariya, who designed Yash’s looks. Bajaj says the collaboration was largely seamless because both designers were aligned on the visual language of the film.
And, ultimately, that visual language comes back to Mohandas’ clarity of vision.
Bajaj explains, "Geethu as a director is so sharp in her vision that when she narrates a character or a scene to us, it's in such detail that we can always visualise it."
It's that combination of clarity and creative freedom made Toxic an unusually rewarding project for her. The film’s costumes are not simply meant to locate characters in a particular decade. They are designed to make each character’s inner world visible, while allowing an enormous ensemble to coexist inside one cohesive world.
“For a costume designer, it was the best project anybody could dream of," she says. "You don't see films that have this happen often.”
And perhaps that is why the cryptic beginning worked. With a limited brief to go on, Bajaj was given enough to start imagining — and enough unanswered questions to build an entire world of her own.