Manish Malhotra Opens Up On His 'Close' Bond With Karan Johar: 'One Night We Decided To Go...'

Fashion designer Manish Malhotra and filmmaker Karan Johar have been friends for over three decades now. In a recent interview, Malhotra opened up about his ‘close’ bond with Johar and recalled how they became friends. Manish revealed that he met Karan for the first time while he was working on the 1993 movie Gumrah, which was produced by KJo’s father, Yash Johar.

“I’ll tell you how I met him. Sridevi called me for Gumrah, which was produced by Yash Johar ji, and on set was where I met Karan. And then, whenever I used to call Yash ji with questions, Karan would pick up the phone. I would just say, ‘Can I speak with Yash ji?’ One day, he just told me, ‘You never say hi’. And I said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Hi Karan, how are you, can I speak to Yash ji’. So it became like that. And then I met him a couple of times on set, and one night we decided to go out for dinner, and we chatted at that time. That’s how we became friends,” Manish said on the We Are Yuvaa YouTube channel.

“Karan was very interested in clothes. He was very interested in what I do, designing for movies. We both loved films. That’s how we got close. And then Duplicate was being made, and I was doing Juhi Chawla’s clothes, and I remember he was interfering in the clothes. And I was like, ‘Why are you interfering in the clothes? You’re just the producer’s son’,” the ace fashion designer added.

Manish further described Karan as a ‘very warm’ person and called their friendship ‘honest’. Manish mentioned that even though he is friends with KJo, it wasn’t easy to work with him. Asked the reason behind the same, the designer explained, “That’s a difficult thing. For friends to work together for that many years, it’s very rare. Because Karan is Karan Johar, and not a lot of people would be comfortable telling him if something doesn’t work.”

He then recalled an incident during the shoot of Johar’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and revealed how he was ‘personally hurt’ when the filmmaker did not like one of his lehengas for the song ‘Suraj Hua Maddham’.

” I took this lehenga very excitedly to his office, and he looked at it and said, ‘This I don’t like’. I was personally hurt. My face started going red. I was very upset. And I just walked out of the office. I might have banged the lehenga on the table,” he said.