Dil Chahta Hai turns 25 this year, and the people who built its rooms and its haircuts are only now talking through how much thought went into details most viewers never consciously clocked.

Avan Contractor did hair on the film, her first job on a movie set. She'd been running a salon before this, and her method carried over. "We would consult the clients, know their likes, dislikes and preferences, and the possibilities that their hair offered," she told The Hindu. "The same principle was used to work with the actors, to make them look more like their characters."

The brief from debutant writer-director Farhan Akhtar was specific, she said. He wanted his three leads to look contemporary and urban, a break from what Hindi cinema's heroes usually looked like. That's how Aamir Khan ended up with a longer hairline running into his cheeks and a goatee that became shorthand for Akash's whole personality.

And the goatee itself wasn't planned. Contractor says Aamir had a beard left over from an earlier film. He came in for a haircut, went off to shave it, and kept walking back in to show the team different half-finished versions. He settled on the goatee alone. The team agreed it worked.

Production designer Suzanne Caplan Merwanji, also on her first big Hindi commercial feature after working internationally, built the three friends' rooms as character studies rather than backdrops. "I had come to understand that set design is meant to enhance the script and the characters and not distract from them," she said.

Akash's room came out sleek, spacious and a little cold, meant to track his money and his transactional read on relationships. Siddharth's was modelled on a Colaba flat that belonged to a friend of Merwanji's, an art collector, echoing what she called the unconventional complexities of his character. Sameer's room stayed simple and nouveau-rich, a nod to a temperament with no edges.

Merwanji's read on why any of this landed the way it did: the film arrived exactly when urban Indian audiences were tilting harder toward Bollywood, and it gave that audience a version of itself it hadn't quite seen on screen before.

The film keeps finding new viewers in the industry itself. Costume designer Sabina Halder, whose recent credits include Call Me Bae and Merry Christmas, first watched Dil Chahta Hai as a kid and remembers it simply as a fun youth film. She's not alone. Twenty-five years in, working technicians are still going back to study how minimal, character-first choices in hair, costume and set design added up to something that reads as effortless.

No anniversary screening or reunion has been formally announced. What's clear from the people who built it is that none of it was accidental, and that's probably why it hasn't dated the way most 2001 Bollywood has.