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Making Faces: Competition and Change in the Production of Bollywood Film Star Looks.
| Hindi popular cinema has long been a source of inspiration for clothing, hair and makeup styles among Indian men and women in the middle to upper classes. Recent explosive growth in the consumer economy, introducing new fashion commodities and beauty services, has affected both what films show, and what film viewers want. Ethnographic research among make-up artists and hairdressers in the Mumbai industry reveals the unfolding relationship between screen images, behind-the-scenes practice, and shifting identities and aesthetic preferences of make-up and beauty practitioners. As the fashion industry develops closer ties with the film industry through film star endorsements, product placement, joint marketing campaigns and so forth, so it is co- opting more and more of the conventional practice arenas of professional film workers in areas of make-up and hair. Make-up artists and hairdressers must compete with a new set of non-film practitioners as the work of preparing the star for the camera shifts from the studio to the salon, the plastic surgeon and the gym. Film workers must continue to assert their claims to knowledge about new products and services, and the validity of their own distinct practice, or find ways in which they too can participate in the fashion as well as film worlds. The chasm that is opening up between established and new practices is shown most clearly in the differences between celebrity make-up artists and hairdressers, and their production company equivalents, differences that figured in recent industrial action in Bollywood to claim better wages and conditions for ordinary film workers. Managing how stars look on and offscreen has practical and rhetorical consequences for who gets to work in the industry, and what terms.
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