Crimson & Emerald & Hot Pink

Crimson is the bridal lehnga — the deep vivid crimson of the traditional North Indian bridal lehnga (Hindi: lehnga or lehenga — also: ghagra — the most elaborate traditional skirt worn by North Indian Hindu brides, typically composed of multiple layers of heavily embroidered silk or brocade fabric in the most festive and most auspicious colors). The deep crimson-to-red bridal lehnga is one of the most traditional and most widespread bridal color choices in North Indian Hindu (Punjabi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, UP, and Bihar) and Bollywood wedding sequences — the crimson represents both the most auspicious warm color (red is the most auspicious of all colors in Hindu tradition — the sindoor, the vermilion powder applied by the groom to the bride's hair parting during the wedding ceremony, marks the bride as married; the red bangles worn by North Indian married women; the red bridal dress tradition) and the most dramatically saturated and most visually striking bridal costume element. The Bollywood bridal sequence is one of the most consistently recurring and most elaborately produced sequences in Hindi cinema — the combination of an elaborate crimson-red lehnga, elaborate gold-and-red bridal jewelry (kundan, polki, jadau — North Indian bridal jewelry traditions), and an elaborate choreographed song-and-dance sequence on an equally elaborate set is one of the defining visual signatures of the Hindi film industry. Emerald is the set vegetation — the vivid jewel-green of the elaborately constructed set design vegetation in Bollywood's most elaborate song-and-dance sequences. From the 1950s (when the Indian film industry began building increasingly elaborate studio sets for its song sequences — initially at the Bombay Talkies and Filmistan studios; later at Film City, Goregaon, Mumbai — one of the largest film production complexes in the world) through the present (when the most elaborate sequences are shot on location in international destinations — Switzerland, New Zealand, Austria — or in the most elaborate purpose-built studio sets in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai), the vivid emerald-green of tropical or lush-temperate vegetation has been the most consistently used cool backdrop element in Bollywood song sequences. Hot Pink is the maximum Bollywood — the electric hot pink of the most characteristically Bollywood-vivid costume, set, and décor elements. The association of hot pink with Bollywood is one of the most internationally recognized of all Bollywood aesthetic signatures — it derives from: (1) the traditional North Indian textile tradition of using maximally saturated synthetic dyes (particularly the aniline-derived magenta and hot pink dyes introduced after 1856 — William Henry Perkin's discovery of mauve — and the subsequent development of increasingly vivid synthetic dyes throughout the late 19th-20th centuries, which were rapidly adopted by North Indian textile dyers for festive clothing); (2) the specific photographic and film technology of the 1950s-1970s — the Eastmancolor film stock used by Indian film productions from approximately 1958 had a specific tendency to render electric pinks and reds as maximally saturated — a characteristic that Bollywood cinematographers and art directors exploited rather than corrected; (3) the Rajasthani textile tradition of using hot-pink (gada ki rang — Hindi: the color of marigold — though technically the most vivid hot pink rather than actual orange-yellow marigold color) as the most festive and most auspicious color for women's celebration clothing.