Gustav Klimt loomed massive over Rahul Mishra’s fall 2025 couture assortment, introduced Monday throughout Paris Haute Couture Week.
Mishra translated Klimt’s lush symbolic language—gold-leaf decadence, layered faces, and sensual mystique—into 30 seems to be that appeared to step instantly off the canvas and onto the Paris runway.
“What struck me most was how not often his topics appeared instantly 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 advised 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 gained 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 methods like zardozi and dabka. In keeping with India Today, the gathering took over 2,000 artisans to create.
The opening look—and maybe essentially the most hanging—a sweeping gold sculptural costume formed like a coronary heart, which displayed veins all through and which was centered by a sequined corset.
“It someway mirrored attraction, love or possibly reverence additionally,” Mishra advised Women’s Wear Daily of Klimt’s ladies. “They carry one thing which is a sort of thriller.”
One other theme working by the gathering was the seven phases of affection from Sufi philosophy—attraction, infatuation, love, belief, worship, insanity, dying. 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 seems to be with cloudlike tulle creations—half halo, half hallucination.
“Love is fixed, it stays on perpetually,” Mishra stated backstage. His imaginative and prescient this season instructed one thing extra layered: love, like artwork, doesn’t simply endure—it transforms.