Warm weather and cut-out fashion are partners in crime.
Because when the sun beats down ruthlessly, it's an invitation to the naughty cut-out dudes in your closet to come tumbling out -- you know those clothing numbers that have little (large too) peepholes in all the right places to keep you both ventilated and desirable.
They come in all kinds -- audacious triangles that expose titillating expanses of hips and abs or the open seductive circles that bring breeze to your chest or the alarmingly bada missing bits of a gown's cloth at your waist etc etc.
And if the styles over in Bollyland are anything to go by, the summer of 2023 has been a raging epidemic of cut-outs. Else it has to be an acute fabric shortage.
The artful aspect to cut-outs is that they are not a full-on boisterous Skin Show Party. You can carefully ration the keyholes and airholes and not go rogue.
Something ought to be left for the imagination, so our darling stars are judiciously doing a slit here and a few cuts there, because less is obvio more.
What have we:
Ruby red choli.
Flirty petticoat with cutouts at the hipbone.
The sari is doing a Mr India on her, but no one's kvetching.
Pretty and powerful all at once, Esha Gupta flashes her patli kamariya in slinky silk.
The unexpected outbreak of skin, that barely toes the line between too much and too little, brings in SM likes in the jillions.
Photograph: Kind courtesy Esha Gupta/Instagram
Nora Fatehi means business when she dons a Prada pair in Doha.
It is the best kind of low-key summer dressing that can take you from the park to the pub in nano-seconds.
Photograph: Kind courtesy Nora Fatehi/Instagram
She goes for the kill in a poolside-to-party piece, with a scooped-style cut-out as large as a giant roomali roti, revealing a third of her torso.
Photograph: Kind courtesy Rakul Singh/Instagram
Her simply-cut dress in a warm nimbu shade offers ample display of enticingly-trim shoulders and arms.
Photograph: Kind courtesy Janhvi Kapoor/Instagram
There's something deliciously off-duty about the virgin white 'fit' Shanaya Kapoor wore for her dad Sanjay Kapoor's 60th, which came along with two peek-a-boo shoulder cutouts that were hardly distracting.
That's probably why the big focal point of this pic remains the birthday boy.
Photograph: Kind courtesy Shanaya Kapoor/Instagram
Mysterious is the mind of a frock, isn't it? With more Gehraiyaan than you would have thought.
Decidedly cool, it is bound to get her the attention from every angle without being scandalous.
Photograph: Kind courtesy Ananya Panday/Instagram
