Needles as Paintbrushes

WHEN BLAKE LIVELY wears an outfit, everyone notices. The American actress has been a bona fide fash­ion icon ever since sh0e appeared in the original Gossip Girl series, and—unlike most celebrities—styles herself. Promot­ing her film, Another Simple Favour, in New York, Lively recently picked an embroidered ‘Cityscape’ 3D pencil skirt from Rahul Mishra’s Spring 2025 couture collection. Days later, as Mishra settles on a couch at his studio in Noida, social media is still abuzz with the appearance. By the end of May, Mishra and his team had dressed up another celebrity—Aditi Rao Hydari, who wore his sleek, hand-embroidered ‘Celestial Aura’ gown to the recently concluded Festival de Cannes.

In the past few years, Indian couturiers have taken big leaps in the international market, showcasing at fashion weeks, retailing at major stories, and dressing up A-list celebrities for global red-carpet events. Mishra is one of this league’s brightest stars—a consistent presence on Parisian runways, in fashion editorials, and in celebrity wardrobes. Think Zendaya and Selena Gomez, Mindy Kaling and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and dozens of big names from across India and around the globe. This is one part of the success story. Last year, Mishra became the first Indian designer to collaborate with Italian luxury brand Tod’s; more recently, he partnered with UK-based designer Bianca Saunders as part of The Movement Exchange pro­gramme by Conde Nast and HSBC.

Mishra says “the way to become a global brand is not trying too hard to become a global brand” but behind his dreamy success story is almost two decades of thoughtful brand-building and refining a global design expression of Indian craftsmanship. The grand spectacle of 3D embroidery has come to be so deeply associated with Mishra’s aesthetics that it’s easy to forget that the craft form made a fairly delayed entry into the brand’s design grammar. A National Institute of Design (NID) Ahmedabad graduate, Mishra founded his epony­mous label with Divya, his spouse who is CEO of the label.

The big leap came in 2014 when Mishra won the International Woolmark Prize—the first Indian to win the award whose past recipients include Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. More design­ers from India have since clinched the prize, but Mishra’s win—still highlighted among his achievements—fast-tracked him into the global fashion ecosystem.

A DECADE SINCE, MISHRA is a seasonal fixture in the French capital—most often at Paris Haute Couture Week where he debuted in 2020. His designs, and his artisanal team’s abilities, exceed its ambitions with each collection. “We have been showcas­ing among the biggest names and best tal­ents in the world. It has helped us up our game, for sure,” he says. “At the same time, this is mine and Divya’s reason to live— we want to keep exploring new things, we want to achieve something new every season.” For Mishra, elevating the brand’s design language and aesthetics is akin to climbing a staircase, each step marking growth in the journey and building on erstwhile learnings. “The staircase isn’t linear, of course. It spirals and moves, as if we were chasing an invisible target that keeps pulling us,” he adds, comparing the journey to that of galaxies moving towards the gravitational force of “The Great Attractor”. (Intergalactic references, Carl Sagan, and Artificial Intelligence are commonplace in conversations with Mishra who was a science student before he switched to design).

Mishra’s collections over the last few seasons exemplify his words. Wield­ing needles and threads as if they were paintbrushes and colour, Mishra and his artisanal team have long conjured lush, painterly landscapes abounding in flora and fauna, fungi and animal life. But recent collections have added new dimen­sions to the storytelling. In 2023, the label showcased its couture collection We the People celebrating the atelier’s exceptional craftsmanship and the hands behind the brand. Aura, his Fall-Winter 2024 couture collection, aimed to embody the meaning of its name in clothing with hat-tips to mythology and spiritualism.

Every Mishra collection is personal, drawn from what he’s reading, watch­ing, listening, and absorbing. But his latest couture collection, The Pale Blue Dot showcased in January may be his most intimate tryst yet. Drawing its name from Carl Sagan’s 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, the designer contemplated urban pollution and toxicity on contemporary life with a soot-black colour palette and architectur­al designs. What made the collection poi­gnant was that Mishra was presenting his collection weeks after his father’s death after a long period of illness. The sorrow manifested in ensembles surrounded by a Raven Sight embroidered frame featuring 3D embroidered birds in flight.

“Grief is the most powerful expression of love,” says Mishra, recalling Indian myths depicting ravens as messengers linking the living and dead. The Raven Sight frame has been captured in pictures by the likes of British photographer Nick Knight and worn by Natasha Poonawalla. The design reminds some of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and others of the late Brandon Lee-starrer, The Crow (where the titular birds serve as a similar link between life and death). Mishra’s storytelling abilities woo critics and consumers irrespective of their geography and cultural references.

Irrespective of its surface design— birds, flowers, buildings, or the cosmos—every piece of clothing is a means of making conversation for Mishra, a medium of evoking a feeling from both creator and consumer that goes beyond the visible and the tangible. “Appreciating the beauty of a design or its fine craftsmanship are straight­forward. We want to achieve a more nuanced emotion,” he says. “How do you create, with clothing as a canvas, things that appear impossible? Craftsmanship creates a version of it.”

Craftsmanship is the beating heart of Mishra’s practice, his design vision brought to life by a veritable army of skilled artisans. “When we start work­ing, we challenge ourselves so the whole process of creativity excites everyone,” he says, calling it the real secret behind the brand’s artisanal prowess. “Craftspeople are able to improvise, and cross hurdles to create new and original things. Crafts­manship presents the power of partici­pation.” Mishra’s maximalist designs have offered a means for upskilling and livelihood generation, but he also regards craft as a foundational pillar of human­ity. “The more I travel, the more I see that anything made by hand, pre-indus­trialisation, was always designed with detail. Human minds have evolved over thousands of years to appreciate design.” It is why Mishra finds himself excited by processes or the number of hours that go into the making of a garment, and takes a personal interest in the well-being of his artisanal team.

While his studio in Noida houses the design headquarters, a significant chunk of the crafts is undertaken by craftspeople in their own hometown and villages— the culmination of a ‘reverse migration’ initiative Mishra started in 2013. Master artisans such as Afzal Zariwala and Noorain Alam have been the brand for years; Mishra even credits Afzal Bhai (as he calls Zariwala) for encouraging him to introduce embroidery in his designs. He takes pride in the fact that Zariwala’s daughter is now studying in London. “We want to make sure that our craftspeople are fairly paid in relation to the cost of a garment, not just minimum wages,” adds Mishra, citing it among his brand’s guard­rails. “Ultimately, there is a gifted artisan, working on designs, who has to be valued. It’s the only way to elevate craft so that it also elevates the lifestyle of craftspeople.”

The celebration of crafts continues, in a more understated approach, with the luxury ready-to-wear label AFEW Rahul Mishra. Launched following the brand’s joint venture agreement with Reliance Brands Limited in 2022, AFEW made its debut at Paris Fashion Week in 2023. Its fall-winter 2025 collection, unveiled at the latest edition of Lakme Fashion Week in association with FDCI this March was a sumptuous interplay of volume and 3D application with bandhani, Madras check wool, and floral prints in glamorous, sexy ensembles. “Though it may take fewer hours than couture and not every mil­limetre of fabric is filled with embroidery, ready-to-wear doesn’t mean it is going to lack craftsmanship,” Mishra asserts.

Mishra and his team are now at work on a new collection which he promises will push the envelope further. A store in Mumbai is coming up, adding to the brand’s retail footprint in Delhi and Hyderabad. With American retailer Saks signing on as AFEW Rahul Mishra’s exclusive retail partner in the US last year, there are also plans for expanding the brands’ international retail footprint, par­ticularly in destinations like Paris. But ask about plans and Mishra is more excited speaking about what he calls his “biggest passion project”—an impact model that builds on the reverse migration initiative. Think of it as a cross between the Rahul Mishra Design Studio and institutions such as NID and Shantiniketan serving multiple roles—a school, a point of con­fluence for creatives, an ecosystem where culture, craft, and community come together. “I have the dream of creating a space that will become the world’s best creative sanctuary,” he says.

Mishra’s life may seem action packed, but the designer insists he moves at his own pace, discovering what fuels his creativity. It can be the process of creating a collection or, as he has done in recent years, designing and building his family home in the hills. “There’s no such thing as a race, unless it’s a competi­tive sport. We might have a great deal of endurance, but one has to humbly realise that impermanence is also a law of life,” he says. “It’s about enjoying the process and the moment. What you cre­ate is an outcome of this joy.”

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