Designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee, returning to New York Fashion Week after 17 years, reflects on beauty, confidence and Vidya Balan’s much‑debated saris. He argues the backlash was never about her clothes but about how her self‑assurance unsettled critics, especially women, and says fashion trains people to judge surfaces instead of inner confidence, which he sees as the real measure of beauty and stardom.
Sabyasachi Mukherjee is gearing up to return to New York Fashion Week after a 17-year absence, closing out a 25-year run in which he turned Indian textiles into a global luxury language.
In a recent conversation with THR India, sitting inside his new flagship store in Delhi, Sabyasachi opened up about beauty, confidence, and the actor whose career he says he helped rescue from a pile-on: Vidya Balan.
When asked to define beauty, he doesn't reach for silhouettes or fabric, but instead reaches for a dating app. "It's like dating: we're constantly swiping left or right, eliminating people on the basis of physical beauty, and we never get to see the beauty within," he said. "Fashion is partly responsible for that."
For a man who built his name on that industry, it's a strikingly modest thesis: that fashion has trained people to swipe past what actually matters. His answer to it is one word — "confidence" — and he circles back to it through the whole conversation, from his own decision to strip his name off his storefronts, to when Vidya Balan approached him regarding a fashion issue.
Mukherjee recalls her coming to him at a time when she was being attacked online for how she dressed, specifically, for wearing saris that she felt got her tagged as an "aunty."
He explains what she told him directly: "Vidya told me that she was uncomfortable with how people treated her, and that she loved wearing saris... but felt people saw her as an 'aunty' for it."
His response was blunt. "I told her that was regressive, and that if she was confident in what she wore, she'd always be beautiful."
Balan kept wearing the saris. What followed, Mukherjee says, was a golden period for both of their careers.
What stayed with him wasn't the comeback, it was who was doing the attacking. "I noticed most of the people attacking her were women," he says. He calls it a turning point in how he understood the backlash: "That was an aha moment for me: it wasn't that they thought she was badly dressed, it was that her confidence unsettled them. Sometimes when we're deeply unhappy with who we are, seeing someone else give themselves permission to be confident really rattles us."
It's a theory he applies well beyond fashion. He sums up his read on stardom this way: "Sometimes I say that the bigger the star, the smaller and simpler the dress. The smaller the star, the bigger the dress. It really is about projection of confidence."
Confidence, for Mukherjee, is also shorthand for a distinction he keeps returning to, between ambition and excellence. "I have a real problem with ambition honestly, but a very comfortable relationship with excellence. Ambition is public; excellence is private. As long as I'm doing something better than I did yesterday, I'm happy," he says.
It's the same instinct, he suggests, that let Balan keep wearing what she wanted without needing the applause to arrive on schedule, and the reason his name has now come off his storefronts, replaced by a tiger logo with no initials.
Beauty, in his telling, isn't dead, just misdiagnosed. People keep swiping on the wrong metric, mistaking the outfit for the woman wearing it. Confidence is the thing that was never on the profile to begin with.
Watch the full interview drop on The Hollywood Reporter India YouTube channel later today