Deeply meditative and thought-provoking, making you ruminate long after the show is over. That’s a Rahul Mishra show. Always. His Couture Spring 2023 showcase unveiled at Paris Haute Couture Week titled ‘Cosmos’ captures Rahul’s limitless imagination and his poetic philosophy rendered through a “deeply artistic” lens. The collection unravels in layers and astonishes with the drama of details and celebrates the master craftsmen and, of course, India. Signature Rahul.
Tell us how you conceptualised the theme and collection...
When you think of cosmos, you think of everything that surrounds you. The more you try to know, the more you realise that you do not know. The beauty is in the vastness and it makes you feel very small. There is a beautiful quote from the Puranas: Yat Pinde Tat Brahmande. It means ‘what is outside is inside you’. This was the first collection where we had a name beforehand. (Laughs) I remember making the first sketch and calling it ‘Cosmos’.
There were various concepts involved. How do you look at time as a scale? How do you look at big or small? Maybe inside a ladybug, there is a whole cosmos or we as humans have the entire cosmos. Everything is interconnected.
It was a difficult collection to comprehend because the cosmos is beyond imagination. Time is like a river. It flows and you cannot live in the same moment again. As we speak, this moment is gone forever. That is the beauty of time and we have represented that through the river theme. Akash Ganga (Milky Way) is also like a river which carries within it the multi-planetary systems, stars and more.
Rahul Mishra
How have you woven in Atlantis, ‘the lost city’?
Atlantis is a forgotten city. Atlantis can also be Dwarka. How do you revisit time? More than creating the cosmos, it was about understanding the nuances of science and philosophy related to the cosmos. That also came into play in creating this collection. I chose The Westin Paris Salon Imperial for the show and this was special because Yves Saint Laurent was showcasing his couture collection at this venue for more than 10 years. It’s like gentle poetry that grows on you and makes you believe in certain ideas and has beauty and calmness rather than shouting for attention.
The shoulders look like wings you could fly with...
I have always liked a gentle amount of construction. It’s like a canvas. This is important to me and I love creating patterns and things, but it should always look like poetry. I don’t want people’s attention to waver from what I want to communicate.
You have used a lot of metal accessories...
Yeah, we have used a lot of metal in the collection. Brass has been recycled to create jellyfish and bugs. For us, we were working with a new material which was also exciting. The idea is to create something beautiful and thought-provoking. For this collection, it was about creating those subtle details as if you are looking at it from a distance and the closer you go, the more you discover. That’s how even our universe is made. The deeper the telescope sees, the more you discover. In a pop age, how do you create something which is classical, which is soulful?
Anoushka Shankar recently wore you at the Grammy Awards..
I have liked her for a long time. For us, it’s about what fits in right with the brand’s DNA. She is amazing and someone with a lot of depth and feeling. The piece she wore was in LA and was apt for her performance. There is a sense of serenity in the outfit and at the same time modern, and she made it look so beautiful. She got the gift from her father and Ravi Shankar was iconic, the guru of gurus.
The sitar is my all-time favourite instrument. It’s almost as if nature is singing. If nature had a sound, it would be that of a sitar. For me, this was also an ‘India’ moment... celebrating the beauty of classical music.... Clothes-wise too, we try to do something which is deeply artistic.
