Gustav Klimt loomed massive over Rahul Mishra’s fall 2025 couture assortment, offered Monday throughout Paris Haute Couture Week.
Mishra translated Klimt’s lush symbolic language—gold-leaf decadence, layered faces, and sensual mystique—into 30 appears that appeared to step straight off the canvas and onto the Paris runway.
“What struck me most was how hardly ever his topics regarded straight out of the canvas. Their eyes had been usually closed or averted, as in the event that they had been misplaced in one other world, Mishra informed Vogue India. “I’ve admired Klimt for years, however curiously, I’d by no means consciously translated his affect into any of my work till now.”
Mishra is a Delhi-based designer, who received the Worldwide Woolmark Prize in 2014 at Milan Style Week; he was the primary Indian designer to take action.
The designer, presenting his fourth assortment in Paris, rendered Kilmt’s motifs utilizing conventional Indian embroidery and clothing-making strategies like zardozi and dabka. In line with India At the moment, the gathering took over 2,000 artisans to create.
The opening look—and maybe essentially the most placing—a sweeping gold sculptural costume formed like a coronary heart, which displayed veins all through and which was centered by a sequined corset.
“It by some means mirrored attraction, love or possibly reverence additionally,” Mishra informed Ladies’s Put on Each day of Klimt’s ladies. “They carry one thing which is a form of thriller.”
One other theme operating by means of the gathering was the seven levels of affection from Sufi philosophy—attraction, infatuation, love, belief, worship, insanity, demise. In between, a surreal backyard bloomed: lotus flowers burst from stem-like bodices, and robes shimmered with finely embroidered florals, their surfaces wealthy with texture and quiet drama. Klimt’s affect surfaced once more in gold hues and swirling patterns, and within the dreamlike multiplicity of faces—love as a collage of reminiscence and identification.
There have been firsts, too. Mishra teamed up with milliner Stephen Jones, who topped off the appears with cloudlike tulle creations—half halo, half hallucination.
“Love is fixed, it stays on ceaselessly,” Mishra stated backstage. His imaginative and prescient this season recommended one thing extra layered: love, like artwork, doesn’t simply endure—it transforms.
