“I've never been so nervous like this,” Shah Rukh Khan said in the afternoon before the Met Gala, where the Indian superstar will be seen as a party of the year on Monday evening.
“I'm wondering if I can get away from now,” added the man whose on-screen derring-do is a legendary film. Multihyphenate, which many ventures have earned him a net worth estimated in hundreds of millions of dollars, has been much loved by him and has been promoted to cult status by fans for generations.
“I'm actually very shy,” Shah Luk Khan said.
The actor in the town of Mumbai was sitting on a sofa in a suite above Manhattan. Much below, the Point Erist Green Carpet of Central Park spread out. Tapping the telecaffe stick onto the heating induction device, Khan carefully reduced the drag. After decades of smoking chains, he quit very publicly on his 59th birthday in 2024. His decision to stop, like almost everything he does, was overshadowed by the South Asian press, with the kind of attention generally dedicated to national issues.
The man behind Shah Rukh Khan's legend is surprisingly reserved. This also applies in a physical sense. With a slender and slight build, Mr. Karn wore a pair of Rick Owens cargo jeans, Rick Owens sneakers and Hermes hoodie thawed deep enough to reveal his smooth, carved breasts and Ardmer Piguet's Royal Oak Chronograph Watch.
Shah Rukh Khan, as we soon realized, is not a fashion follower, but he spent a day in New York, wandering the aisles of Saks and Bergdorf Goodman, hunting the “perfect pair” of jeans.
“I'm a jeans and a t-shirt guy,” Kahn said. Mr. Khan had bought the first clothes that were made while attending St. Columba, a private boys school in New Delhi, but it was a five-pocket denim pair in a shop called Junction Jeans.
Mr. Khan will dress for Met Gala in a very simple way by Sabyasachi Mukherjee, one of India's top designers. “The only thing he said was, 'I don't want to wear shoulder pads that look like an airplane,'” Mukherjee said.
For a very short turn on the red carpet (he resumes filming party nights back in India), Mr Khan offers his own interpretation of the theme in the evening celebrating black male style and dandyism, the quality celebrated in the Indian millennium.
“He's simply dressed, and we respect that,” said Mukherjee, who designed the Maasidabad silk coat jacket for the superstar, resembling a mogul-style sherwani, black pants and a black crepe de chine shirt. He also carries a walk rod with a tiger head decorated with jewels.
“It's a bit of a rapper,” Khan said of the sparkle, adding that this first Met Gala red carpet could also be his last.
“I know a lot of people in the fashion industry, but that's not really my world,” he added. His snap's decision to accept Mukeljee's invitation to Gala was influenced in part by his desire to counter some of the more harmful stereotypes about South Asian actors. “The West is still looking at you as this exotic Peter Sellers birdie number 'type,” Kern said. It's probably worth noting that despite him having nearly 50 million Instagram followers and a huge global fanbase, he hasn't appeared in Hollywood films yet.
“I'm not too reserved when I say I don't know about the stardom I have,” Khan refers to herself as “mythical employee.” That doesn't suggest that he is unaware of the snapshots of his single red carpet that this particular red carpet can have. “It would be strange or unacceptable to play a role on the red carpet while I'm acting,” said Khan, who has long gone by the need to promote anything or pretend to be someone.
On this particular Monday night in May, Shah Luk Khan plays himself.
