Rahul Mishra’s DEVI Is a Masterclass in Haute Couture

Everyone quotes Michelangelo on seeing the angel in the marble. He probably never said it. Rahul Mishra doesn’t need him to. On Monday evening at the Collège des Bernardins, the designer made the point that Indian temple carvers were working through the same idea centuries before Florence got there, and then he flipped it. Sculpture reveals by cutting away. Mishra’s couture reveals by piling on: thread over thread, bead over bead, until embroidery starts passing for stone.

“DEVI” is built on the apsaras, devis and celestial attendants carved into the sandstone, granite and basalt of India’s temples and cave sanctuaries. Look closely at those figures and you notice something: they’re barely clothed. Jewellery does the work of dress. Girdles, armlets, anklets, stacked necklaces, ceremonial crowns. The body is the garment and the ornament is the language. That’s the code Mishra cracked open for Fall 2026, and he ran it with total conviction.

Building “DEVI”

The clothes themselves are a technical flex. Zardozi and dabka, techniques older than most European fashion houses, meet crystals, stones and bugle beads to build trompe-l’œil surfaces that read as carved basalt, soapstone, bronze. Then you clock that the garments are featherweight. That’s the trick the Rahul Mishra atelier keeps pulling off, and it never gets less impressive. Under the Gothic vaults of the Bernardins, the models looked like temple figures that had walked off the wall and decided to keep going.

Mishra didn’t outsource the world-building. His team brought in Sumant Kumar, a murtikar working in traditional clay, to make headpieces based on the crowns worn by the stone figures. Stephen Jones, a longtime collaborator of the house, handled the veils and the rest of the millinery. Two craft traditions, one show, no friction. The soundtrack went further: composer Jayant Luthra recorded mridangam, ghatam, temple drums and singing bowls inside the Ajanta Caves, which date to the second century BCE, then structured the compositions around Fibonacci sequences. The stated goal was to recreate the acoustics of the caves in a 13th-century Parisian college. Ambitious. It worked.

Indian Luxury Takes Center Stage

The front row got the memo. Isha Ambani was in the room, and her presence landed as more than a bold-faced name on a seating chart. Here is one of the most powerful figures in Indian business and cultural patronage watching a collection about how Indian women have carried identity through adornment for two millennia. The symmetry wasn’t subtle and it didn’t need to be. If anyone still thinks Indian luxury is waiting for Paris to approve it, this show and this front row said otherwise.

The Tanishq partnership drove that home. Mishra co-designed a run of high jewellery looks with the Tata-owned house, and the pieces weren’t accessories. They were the argument. Embroidery, movement and narrative translated into diamonds and gemstones, conceived as extensions of the couture rather than complements to it. In the temple carvings, jewellery replaces the dress. On Mishra’s runway, the dress and the jewellery kept trading places. Point made.

Beyond Heritage

Mishra’s résumé does a lot of quiet work here. First Indian designer invited to show at Paris Haute Couture Week. Woolmark Prize winner. Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres since 2023. Suzy Menkes called him a national treasure. But the more interesting fact is structural: his house runs on hand work by Indian artisan communities, paid and credited, under a philosophy he calls mindful luxury. Plenty of brands talk about craft while their embroidery gets done anonymously in the same workshops Mishra names on his credits sheet. He built the supply chain into the story instead of hiding it. That’s the edge under all the beauty.

The risk with a collection like this is reverence. Heritage shows can curdle into costume, and a designer bowing to the archive usually ends up flattened by it. Mishra dodged that. “DEVI” isn’t a tribute act; it’s an interrogation. What kept a carver returning to the same figure for months, years? How does dead material end up suggesting a soul? The collection treats those questions as live problems, and the atelier answers them the only way it can: with time, repetition and hands.

The show notes end with the idea that the eternal muse has travelled across centuries, always returning to the artist’s imagination, and that the women who wear the couture complete the journey. Fine. But strip the poetry and the claim underneath is harder and better: the oldest design language on the subcontinent still works, still moves, still sells, and it took a designer from Kanpur to prove it on a runway in the 5th arrondissement. Monday’s show wasn’t an argument for Indian couture’s arrival. That already happened. It was a demonstration of what happens after.