“Simple” and “Rahul Mishra” have never met; they haven’t even exchanged pleasantries. His couture collection, called Alchemy, meditated on the transience of the five elements: ether, air, water, fire, and earth, foundational forces that he tried to interpret through actual clothes. “The idea was to explore them scientifically, philosophically, and creatively,” he explained backstage with the aplomb of someone who might not really work in fashion but belong to an esoteric scholarly order.
Mishra described this tour de force as “a pilgrimage in couture” (because a straightforward journey would be far too literal for him), one in search of sensation, emotion, and possibly enlightenment, somewhere between a hemline and a hand-embroidered motif. Mishra tasked his extraordinarily skilled Indian artisans to translate this philosophical magma into garments, giving physical form to the ineffable. Alchemy, indeed, because turning metaphysics into couture is no small feat, even with near-magical hands.
The journey began, appropriately, with earth, though not the friendly, soil-under-your-feet kind. These were pitch-black, highly dramatic creations: elaborate constructions propped up by wire frameworks or swollen into inflated forms that expanded around the body. They were painstakingly embroidered and sequined to evoke spiraling black holes, mineral accretions, or whatever else the Big Bang may have flung into existence in Rahul Mishra’s imagination. Earth, it seems, arrived not as ground, but as rather ominous cosmic event.
Water appeared as round-shaped, short, diaphanous concoctions drenched in crystalline waves of sequins and beads, splashed with cheerful excess, recreating swirling vortices and those silvery reflections usually reserved for oceans, rivers, waterfalls and photoshopped postcards. Fire followed with far less subtlety and considerably more attitude: embroidered flames burst forcefully from corsets and bustier dresses, proving that combustion can, in fact, be glamorous. Air and ether, never ones to shout, whispered their presence through layers of transparency, strategically adjusted around the silhouettes, floating somewhere between suggestion and disappearance.
Mishra said that the collection was inspired by an extended retreat to his home in the Himalayan mountains, prompted by Delhi’s less-than-breathable air. There, surrounded by actual clean oxygen and water that didn’t come with a warning label, he began reflecting on the basics we so casually overlook. Air, sunlight, warmth, a passing breeze, soil that somehow keeps producing nurturing food: miracles, really, yet treated like default settings. The result, he said, was a collection that sits somewhere between science, philosophy, and art, with a gentle reminder that maybe we shouldn’t wait for an environmental crisis to appreciate being able to inhale.
