Priyanka Chopra Steals the Night in Pink as InStyle’s Woman of Impact at Imagemaker Awards

Some nights in Hollywood belong to the stars on screen. Thursday night belonged to the people standing just out of frame — and to one woman who has spent a quarter-century making sure the frame got wider. Priyanka Chopra walked into the third annual InStyle Imagemaker Awards in Los Angeles, picked up the Woman of Impact Award, and turned the whole evening into a reminder of just how far she has carried her career — from a beauty pageant stage in India to the very top of two film industries.

She did it in pink. A lot of pink. The kind of pink that photographs like a dare.

The ceremony, held on Thursday, October 15, in Los Angeles and hosted by InStyle Editor-in-Chief Sally Holmes, exists for a reason most awards shows ignore. It celebrates the stylists, makeup artists, hairstylists, manicurists, and other creative professionals behind Hollywood’s most memorable looks — the people who build the images the rest of us spend all year talking about. For one night, the red carpet flipped its usual script: the stars showed up to hand out trophies to the people who usually dress them.

And Chopra, fittingly, arrived as both a guest of honor and a walking example of what those imagemakers do. Her look — a pink two-piece from Matières Fécales, styled by Law Roach — became one of the most talked-about fashion moments of the night before the ceremony had even really gotten going.

A Pink Moment Worth Talking About

Let’s start with the outfit, because honestly, that’s where half the room started too. Chopra wore a rose-pink two-piece from Matières Fécales, put together by Roach, one of the most influential stylists working today. It was soft and sculptural at the same time — the kind of look that only works when the person wearing it has the confidence to let the clothes do some of the talking and then quietly outshine them anyway.

She finished it with jewelry from Emily P. Wheeler’s Sphere collection — pieces that hadn’t even launched yet. The collection officially debuts on October 20, which meant Chopra got to wear the future a few days early. That’s the kind of perk that comes with being Priyanka Chopra. Designers don’t just want her wearing their work; they want her wearing it first.

There was a neat little wrinkle to the evening, too. Roach himself picked up an award during the ceremony, which turned the night into something of a reunion for the stylist and the actress. When your stylist is also getting honored in the same room, the red carpet photos hit a little different. These two have a history — Roach has shaped some of Chopra’s most memorable fashion moments over the years — and Thursday felt like a public acknowledgment of that partnership, with both of them standing in the spotlight instead of just one.

Presenting Chopra’s honor were Megan Suri, Avantika Vandanapu, and Amita Rao. That choice said something on its own. The Woman of Impact Award isn’t just a pat on the back for a long career; it’s about the doors a person has opened for the people coming up behind her. Having three younger South Asian women hand her the trophy made the point without anyone needing to spell it out in a speech.

Why This Award Fits Her Better Than Most

Here’s the thing about Priyanka Chopra: there are very few careers in entertainment that look anything like hers. She won Miss World in 2000 at eighteen, which in most stories would be the whole story — pageant queen, done. Instead, it was barely the prologue.

She went on to become one of Bollywood’s biggest stars, headlining hit after hit in Hindi cinema through the 2000s and 2010s. Then, when most actors would have settled comfortably into being a legend in one industry, she walked into a second one and started over. Her American TV breakthrough came with Quantico, where she played FBI recruit Alex Parrish and became the first South Asian woman to headline an American network drama. Think about that for a second. First. In the 2010s. That’s not a fun trivia fact; it’s an indictment of how long Hollywood took — and a measure of what it took to break through.

Since then, she’s stacked up a filmography that jumps between continents and genres without ever looking like it’s trying too hard: Baywatch, The Matrix Resurrections, the spy thriller Citadel, and the action comedy Heads of State, where she more than held her own alongside a very crowded cast. She’s produced, she’s written a memoir, she’s built businesses, and she’s used her platform for UNICEF work that predates most of her Hollywood fame.

That’s what “woman of impact” actually means in her case. It’s not a vague compliment. It’s a ledger. Pageant winner, Bollywood star, Hollywood lead, producer, author, advocate, mother. Every chapter involved kicking down a door that had been shut for a long time, then holding it open.

Her personal life has been part of the story too, in the best possible way. Her marriage to Nick Jonas has been one of those rare celebrity unions that seems to get warmer and more comfortable in public rather than colder, and the couple’s daughter Malti Marie has made regular, carefully managed appearances that have only deepened fans’ affection for the family. Chopra has always been candid about the juggling act — the travel, the two industries, the motherhood, the whole beautiful chaos of it — and that honesty is a big part of why audiences on two continents feel like they know her.

The Night Belonged to the People Behind the Looks

As much as Chopra was the evening’s headliner, the Imagemaker Awards exist to make sure the applause spreads around. The whole point of the event is to honor the stylists, makeup artists, hairstylists, manicurists, and creatives whose names rarely make the headlines even though their work is literally what the headlines are about. Every iconic red carpet moment you’ve ever argued about online was somebody’s long day of fittings, sketches, and last-minute stitching.

Joey King showed up for exactly that reason — to celebrate her longtime manicurist, Thuy Nguyen, who was honored during the evening. King wore an Alex Perry look with an Alexis Bittar necklace, Savfriedkin jewelry, Larroudé x Nicolò Beretta shoes, and an Ahikoza bag. It was polished and grown-up, the kind of look that says “I know exactly who I am on a red carpet.” But the sweetest part of her night was that she was there, in part, to applaud someone else.

Charli XCX brought her own kind of energy, as she always does, in a custom Balmain look with Bucherer fine jewelry. She presented an award to Chris Horan, the stylist behind several of her standout fashion moments. Charli’s fashion story is one of the most interesting in pop right now — she’s gone from brat-summer chaos to genuinely fearless high-fashion risk-taking — and Horan has been right there for a lot of it. Watching her hand him a trophy was one of those small, full-circle moments the evening does best.

The Rest of the Room Showed Up Too

The guest list read like a cross-section of everything Hollywood is right now. Heidi Klum wore Leviev diamonds and Zydo Italy jewelry. Jessica Belkin stepped out in Manolo Blahnik sandals. Elizabeth Debicki, who has quietly become one of the most elegant presences on any red carpet she touches, wore a Kallmeyer halter gown with Jimmy Choo sandals. Hannah Einbinder went a completely different direction in a leather Intrecciato coat from Bottega Veneta — proof that “red carpet” doesn’t have to mean “gown” anymore, if it ever really did.

Ella Beatty attended in an Akris Cruise 2027 bustier fringe dress. Megan Suri — who had presented Chopra’s award earlier in the night — wore a Bach Mai spiral gown. Avantika accessorized with Tiffany & Co. jewelry. Megan Thee Stallion stunned in Robert Wun Couture, which is exactly the sentence you expect to write about Megan Thee Stallion, and it was true anyway. Tyriq Withers and Costa D’Angelo both wore Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.

Also photographed at the event: Adam Driver, Simu Liu, Lisa Rinna, Julia Stiles, Anna Cathcart, True Whitaker, Hayes Warners, and Molly Greenwald, among others. It was that kind of room — the kind where you turn around and there’s another famous face, and another, and another, and half of them are there to cheer for their glam teams.

That’s the charm of the Imagemaker Awards, now in its third year. Most awards shows are about who won. This one is about who made the winning look possible. The stars know it, too. You could feel it in the way the evening unfolded — presenters talking about their stylists like family, honorees getting emotional about the people who believed in them before anyone else did, and a room full of A-listers happy to share the stage for once.

What the Night Really Said

If there’s a bigger takeaway from Thursday, it’s this: Hollywood’s image machine runs on collaboration, and the people who make the images are finally getting their own night to be seen. Chopra’s honor sits at the center of that idea. Her whole career has been a collaboration — with stylists, directors, writers, and audiences across two continents — and she’s never pretended otherwise.

She’s also proof that impact doesn’t have to look one way. Sometimes it looks like headlining a network drama nobody thought would cast her. Sometimes it looks like producing stories that wouldn’t exist without her. Sometimes it looks like walking into a room in head-to-toe pink, accepting a trophy from three women who grew up watching her, and making the whole thing look effortless.

Effortless is the wrong word, of course. Nothing about her career has been effortless. That’s precisely why the award fits. Chopra has spent more than two decades making the hard stuff look easy — crossing industries, crossing cultures, crossing every line Hollywood drew for her — and Thursday night, in a room full of the people who build the magic, she got a moment to stand in the middle of it and just be celebrated.

She earned it. The pink was just a bonus.

Source: Just Jared