By Rohan Sen, Culture Editor

If you opened Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts between 2022 and 2024, you didn’t have to scroll far. You saw the clip. A grainy, upscaled 4K version of actor Shakti Kapoor—the iconic ‘Crime Master Gogo’ from Andaz Apna Apna—leaning into the camera, making a distinct whistling-sucking sound with his teeth, pulling a face that oscillates between disgust, mischief, and indigestion.

We have a name for it now. The "Shakti Kapoor Sucking Face."

But here is the paradox shaking up the editorial world: This clip is not ruining fashion content. It is consuming it.

For the last 18 months, luxury brands, streetwear influencers, and high-fashion editors have noticed a bizarre pattern. The single most referenced reaction meme in fashion commentary isn't Zoolander’s Blue Steel or Timothée Chalamet looking bored. It is a 63-year-old character actor, dressed in a garish mustard sweater, doing something that looks like he is trying to unstick a pani puri from his molars.

Let’s talk about how Shakti Kapoor single-handedly ‘sucked’ the taste out of minimalism and injected raw chaos into style content.

Shakti Kapoor’s fashion didn't work without his attitude. To truly pull off this style, you need to adopt the persona:

A "plain cotton tee" has no place in this wardrobe. Texture implies wealth and status.

Shakti Kapoor never met a neutral tone he liked. His wardrobe was a riot of color designed to signal that he was the boss.

The irony is thick. Shakti Kapoor is not a stylish man in that movie. He wears a sweater that looks like a couch from a 1980s waiting room. His hair is a greasy wave. He is, by traditional metrics, a fashion corpse.

But in 2025, that is the point.

We are living through the Anti-Aesthetic. The rise of 'Normcore' and 'Gorpcore' has died. In its place is 'Garbage-core'—an ironic embrace of the garish. Shakti Kapoor sucking his teeth is the insignia of this movement.

Look at the high-fashion runways of Paris and Milan. Designers are literally making clothes that look like "mistakes." Holes where there shouldn't be holes. Shoulders that look like the 1980s vomited on them. When you see a Rick Owens model looking like a doomsday prep wizard, your brain doesn't say "elegant." It says "Chuuuu."

Shakti Kapoor has become the internal monologue of the fashion critic who has given up on logic.