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Inside Rahul Mishra’s Fall 2025 Couture Show That Had Everyone Talking in Paris
Inspired by Sufi philosophy, Gustav Klimt and a song from a Mani Ratnam movie, designer Rahul Mishra’s latest collection dissects love — biologically, culturally and viscerally.
A designer with vision, technique and a sculptor’s eye, Rahul Mishra’s garments are dramatic and larger-than-life, yet obsessively detailed, given that they are almost always handmade. When he puts on a show, the world watches.
Mishra’s recent Fall/Winter 2025 show at the Paris Haute Coutre Week was no exception. The designer spoke to The Hollywood Reporter India the day he landed back in India, still hearing rave reviews.
“I look at The New York Times’ Instagram page or Financial Times and [see my] garments there, where fashion hardly makes news,” Mishra says with a smile. “I remember when I finished the show, I went backstage and was [looking back] at all the mistakes. I was discontent, thinking, ‘we could have done this better’.”
Yet, what stayed with him was that the audience got it. “Everyone understood the concept.” And why wouldn’t they?
Mishra is among the rare designers who doesn’t leave emotion up to interpretation — he builds it, stitch by stitch.
Titled Becoming Love, the collection is Mishra’s take on love in all its layered, all-consuming and at times, gut-wrenching glory. Structured in seven parts — each inspired by the Sufi philosophy of love’s evolution from attraction to ultimate surrender — the show wove a familiar narrative. There were tons of roses (“they had to be there,” he says), echoes of painter Gustav Klimt’s figures, and a cinematic nod to the dreamlike “Satrangi Re” from Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se.. (1998).
A Season of Love
“It’s been hectic, yes,” Mishra says, “but it was great — so no complaints.” This latest haute couture collection had been simmering in his mind for years. The challenge? Translating something as intangible as emotion — especially love — into a tangible form. “When you choose a visually driven theme, it’s straightforward,” he explains. But love isn’t a single feeling — it’s a spectrum of emotions, each with its own rhythm and texture.
Drawing from literature, art, culture and even biology, Mishra constructed the collection as a meditation on the many manifestations of love. Klimt’s romantic symbolism finds a place alongside the sacred grass of Lord Krishna. “The heart isn’t just a metaphor,” he says. “It’s a biological organ that responds when we fall in love. There’s a psychological shift too.” And that is what he wanted to explore — both visually and viscerally.
Bringing this vision to life was far from easy. Mishra and his team designed seven mini-collections within a larger one — each representing a different stage or emotion of love. “The first look for any concept is always the hardest,” he says. “After that, you can build around it. But this time, we had to do it seven times over. There were so many rounds of trial and error, so many failures in the studio.”
Crafting garments with weight, volume and movement that still resonate emotionally required engineering as much as artistry. “With 3D elements, we had to control how the piece draped and moved on the body.” He likens the process to a basketball game: the audience sees the perfect shot, but behind every successful look are hundreds of missed attempts. “For those 34 final garments, we must’ve failed 300 times. But that’s what keeps us learning.”
Textiles, too, were chosen not just for their beauty but for metaphor. “We had an idea, how initial attraction [in love] brings a rush of blood in one’s body and they start feeling their heartbeat.” That opening piece featured a golden heart, symbolising the exhilaration of falling in love. “We always think of love as something of the heart,” Mishra says. “Even though it’s the brain that governs emotion, the heart becomes the symbol — because it reacts. It’s the physical manifestation of what we feel.”
With Becoming Love, Mishra invites his audience to not just wear emotion, but to feel it. And to think, it all began with a song.
“Four years ago, I was playing [“Satrangi Re”]. I was returning after shooting one of my collections at Kishangarh. On the way, I was playing A.R. Rahman’s songs, and this one came on. I knew so I was [talking about it] with my team,” he recalls, adding, “It’s a dream sequence, a song within a song — but within three minutes, how do you showcase all seven emotions?”
While he didn’t think it would lead to a collection at the time, this eventually became a culmination of sorts, of all his past collections. For example, Mishra’s collection, Aura, captured that atmosphere; last season, he delved into grief. “This came about to me, it happened — almost like becoming love.”
The Influences
The designer is often inspired by music and cinema. In fact, his first-ever couture collection in Paris in Spring 2020, was inspired by Madagascar (2005). He laughs as he recollects: “My daughter was four years old then, watching Madagascar on repeat. Her screen time was less, but whenever she could, she would just watch this movie.”
His biggest sources of inspiration? Hayao Miyazaki’s animations, besides the films Interstellar (2014) and Dead Poets Society (1989).
Despite his love for the movies, Mishra is not looking to design costumes for films any time soon. “Never say never, but given my schedule — the back-to-back shows — I don’t know if I have that kind of time.” He adds, “Unless something really exciting comes, even more so than what I do right now.” However, the designer doesn’t believe costume design requires much originality. It simply needs to fit the characters.
And in his case, originality comes first. When Mishra first debuted on the Paris fashion calendar in 2014, he set an ambitious goal: within a decade, to become an unavoidable presence on the global fashion stage. This season, that has come to life. “We feel we’ve reached a point where people stop and take notice — they don’t want to miss our show,” he reflects. But for him, it’s never about being just an Indian designer. “I am a fashion designer who happens to be from India, deeply rooted in its craftsmanship and ideas.”
Mishra’s work speaks to a larger narrative — one where Indian heritage is no longer a quiet contributor to global fashion but a celebrated author of it. “India’s craftsmanship has influenced fashion for centuries, from chintz and muslin to block prints,” he says. “But often, credit was missing.” Now, major fashion houses acknowledge ‘Made in India’ not just as a mark of craft but as a symbol of creative authorship. This shift, he believes, elevates India’s place on the world stage — where both the mind and hands behind the fashion are Indian.
And because of using slow craftsmanship, his brand is also sustainable. His couture is detailed and often commands a high price, he explains.
Mishra continues, “Why do we want to create couture which is not expensive? Ultimately, couture becomes a medium for us to employ more people. The slower the process, the better it is. For society, for sustainability, for culture, for everything.”
Over 2,000 artisans are employed directly or indirectly (Mishra’s workspace is located in Noida), many mastering complex techniques that require patience and precision. Training, Mishra notes, happens on the job. “Within six months, our artisans start signing pieces. Our work uses hundreds of materials and colours in a single garment — so the process demands constant attention, stopping and checking samples. That’s the beauty of what we do.”
This commitment comes from not only understanding but being a part of the fabric of this country. Mishra’s journey from a village in Uttar Pradesh to Parisian runways was far from planned. “I was good at studies, had a science degree, but I wanted to be an artist,” he shares. His early passions ranged from caricatures of political leaders to dreams of studying art or mass communication. “I applied everywhere I could — NIFT, NID, College of Art — wherever I got selected, I went.”
What drives him now isn’t just success — it’s a quiet revolution: to reshape how Indian fashion is seen, worn and remembered. Not through noise, but through passion, patience, and a relentless becoming of love.
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