Inside the most searched couture presentation of the season

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On July 6, at Collèges des Bernardins, Rahul Mishra staged the presentation Paris Haute Couture Week has spent the season anticipating. DEVI, his Fall 2026 collection, does not merely reference India’s temple sculpture — it attempts to resurrect it, thread by thread, on the body of the modern muse. Where Michelangelo spoke of subtraction, freeing a figure already waiting inside the marble, Mishra works in reverse: accumulation, stitch upon stitch, until embroidery reads as carved stone.

The reference point is centuries deep. Across South Asian temple walls, sandstone and basalt were once worked into apsaras, devis and celestial dancers, their bodies annotated in jewellery, posture and mudra rather than cloth. Mishra’s atelier translates that vocabulary using zardozi and dabka, ancient hand techniques layered with stones, crystals and bugle beads to produce surfaces that appear sculpted rather than sewn — a trompe-l’œil effect built for the runway and, increasingly, for the camera.

The collaborations widen the story’s reach. Milliner Stephen Jones, a longtime house partner, produced veils and headpieces alongside bespoke crowns by clay artisan Sumant Kumar, drawing directly from ceremonial temple imagery. Rene Caovilla dressed the runway in hand-finished Venetian shoes. And in a season-defining partnership, Tanishq Natural Diamonds co-designed a suite of high jewellery conceived not as accessory but as continuation of the couture itself — embroidery translated into gemstone architecture.

Sculpture reveals through subtraction. Couture, here, reveals through accumulation.

The soundtrack mattered as much as the silhouettes. Composer Jayant Luthra built the show’s score from temple percussion — mridangam, ghatam, kanjeera, manjeera and thavil — recorded inside the second-century Ajanta Caves and structured around Fibonacci sequencing, an ancient compositional logic shared by music, art and architecture across the region. For Mishra, the first Indian designer invited to present at Paris Haute Couture Week and a 2014 International Woolmark Prize winner, DEVI is less a costume history than a question: what held the sculptor’s gaze long enough to suggest a soul in still stone. Couture, he argues, asks the same of its wearer — patience, repetition, and the transformation of memory into presence.

The setting suited the argument. Collèges des Bernardins, a thirteenth-century Parisian college turned event space, gave DEVI the kind of vaulted, devotional architecture that no runway built for the season could fake — stone answering stone. It was here, on July 6, that Mishra’s collaborators converged: Stephen Jones and Sumant Kumar on crowns that borrowed the silhouette of temple deities, Rene Caovilla underfoot, Tanishq’s diamonds reframed as sculpture rather than accessory, and Jayant Luthra’s score, recorded inside the Ajanta Caves themselves, closing the loop between sound and stone.

What lingers after DEVI is not spectacle but stillness — the sense of a designer asking his craftsmen to work as slowly, and as devotedly, as the anonymous artisans who once carved eternity into rock. In an industry addicted to velocity, Mishra has again made the case that couture’s real luxury is time.

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