The metallic muse

For his Paris Couture Week show, Rahul Mishra seeks inspiration in the peepal

Rahul Mishra called his Fall 2022 couture show, The Tree of Life, and as expected, it foraged through the long, densely packed wisdom and abundance of a banyan tree. The banyan in the courtyard of his ancestral home was the muse, and reflected on the symphony of life; nature’s gold by exploring the chromatic streaks of the sunset sky glittering and dancing on its elliptical leaves. 

Rahul Mishra

It all sounds a tad complicated until you watch the show, held on July 4 as part of the Paris Haute Couture Week calendar. He maintained the whimsy of nature by borrowing from the style notes of the banyan, its distinctive markings and swirling foliage. The exotic palette of gold, orange, yellow and pink dazzled up the panels of the 3D-structured cocoon dresses (his design mainstay) with silken veins of liquid-gold threads sculpting the bodice and arched sleeves of evening gowns, bodysuits and a pair of reimagined lehengas. Mishra didn’t hold back. The beguiling two and three-dimensional embroidery that brought the fabric’s surfaces literally to life took over 10,000 hours to execute by specialist needlework artisans.

In lesser hands, these ensembles would have easily looked ornamental, but here, they carried the warm sentimentality associated in this writer’s mind with the gold-leaf tradition of Dussehra. Apta leaves (the Bauhinia racemosa tree leaf symbolically represents gold or sona) are exchanged between family and friends with the greeting, sona ghya ani sonyasarkhey raha, which translates to—take the gold and shine like gold. Mishra might just have found his pot of gold through this mix of cultural cross-references and all things couture.

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