The Lush Socialite: Editor Chinki Sinha in Conversation with Shalini Passi

Описание: After her debut in 'Bollywood Wives vs. Fabulous Lives', Delhi's Shalini Passi, philanthropist, influencer, Bollywood celebrity and self-care diva, who gives little boxes of herbal dust to her friends, is now in the mass eye. Fair or unfair, deal with her.

Passi, also an art entrepreneur whose eccentricities are now a rage after her debut in 'Fabulous Lives Vs. Bollywood Wives', is a persona frozen in time.
That time is now. Some are even calling her the new self-care guru. Passi is now everywhere. She knows nothing lasts forever. This fame that she had always aspired for has come to her at last.

She walked the runway for several designers over the last few years and in 2020, in a flaming red dress, she was part of an allegorical tale in artist Vibha Galhotra’s 'The Final Feast' where she is the protagonist who cuts a blue “globe-cake” before the rich and the elite leave the earth that has fallen apart after the human greed has finished all resources. Inspired by 'The Last Supper' by Leonardo Da Vinci, the staged-photo work is a sarcastic take on the rich and the rising inequality. Passi fit the part perfectly.

Passi has been dismissed as vacuous but it is true that she has become this phenomenon, a persona that an academic said is an interesting study.

There is a strange quiet that envelopes the house that’s part museum and part an indulgence of a woman who is determined to arrive everywhere. It is a house where there is perpetual summer or fall depending on your mood.

Passi is many things now but mostly someone who is an almost agent provocateur who is forever placed in that liminal space between imaginary and reality. She can afford to be there with her wealth and her curated style. When Karan Johar calls her “Cleopatra” at an art event in Mumbai, she glides past the sarcasm and owns the tag and everything else that comes with it.

Mostly, fame.

Outfits by: Samant Chauhan and Rajesh Pratap

Camera: Vikram Sharma, Suresh Pandey, Tribhuvan Tiwari, Divya

Editor: Sudhanshu