India Couture Week 2025: Threads of Identity, Echoes of Dreams

 

image courtesy of JJ Valaya

 

text by Parrie Chhajed

Every July, Delhi transforms. The city, with its bustling character and chaos, becomes home to the patronage of Indian fashion. A legacy, a staged walk by greats, it hosts the India Couture Week, a celebration of craftsmanship and couture, a sanctum where heritage meets modernity, and where the past and future walk parallel. 

India Couture Week 2025 was held at the iconic Taj Palace Hotel in Delhi, curated by the FDCI ( Fashion Design Council of India ). The week staged poetic interactions between culture and innovation, local and global. 

Since its founding in 2008, India Couture Week has become a pivotal event in the Indian fashion calendar. The event is an ethos of the Indian spirit rooted in traditions, craftsmanship, and artisanal heritage. An answer to the Paris Haute Couture Week, an interpretation derived from India’s passed down stories and values, honoring the handicrafts that characterize Indian design. 

Through the years, ICW has recognized and defined moments in the careers of Indian designers and placed India on the global stages and fashion and luxury map. It remains one of the few platforms where, every year, we backtrace further into our culture and craftsmanship while creating new stories and keeping up with today's silhouettes and innovations. 

While last year revolved around softness and sentiments, the 2025 couture week conversed about identity, urging us to look deep within. The ideologies were seen being represented through shapes, silhouettes, and styles appliqued with reimagined traditions.

Through the lenses of legacy, identity, and reinvention, stories unfolded on the runway, and the ones that shone out the most were: Rahul Mishra, Amit Aggarwal, JJ Valaya, Aisha Rao, and Ritu Kumar.

Rahul Mishra – Becoming Love

 
 

The week opened with Rahul Mishra’s ethereal collection titled Becoming Love, which unfolded like a flower in the rain. Inspired by Sufiism’s magic, Mishra’s couture offered seven stages of love, each captured in finely hand-embroidered stories across fabrics such as silk organza, velvet, and tulle.

A combination of magnificence and reality. While one moment, a gown shimmered like Klimt’s The Kiss, the next, a lehenga carried the ache of longing. Alas came Tamannaah Bhatia, walking down the runway in a sculpted floral gown—proof once again that Rahul Mishra stitches emotion into every sequin.

Amit Aggarwal — Arcanum

 
 

If Mishra spoke of emotion, Amit Aggarwal answered with introspection. His collection Arcanum—a word meaning ‘mystery’—explored identity through the architecture of DNA. Using his signature polymer techniques and handwoven metallics, Aggarwal built garments like sacred codes: twisted helixes, cocooned corsets, and chrysalis gowns.

But behind the science was softness. There was something deeply moving about how structure met surrender. Couture here was not just worn—it was inhabited. Aggarwal reminded us that even the future has ancestry.

JJ Valaya — East

 
 

No one stages drama quite like JJ Valaya, and East—his closing show and a celebration of 33 years in fashion—was an imperial epic. A curation and compilation of Ottoman silks, Rajput extravagance, and East Asian tapestries, the collection was detailed and imaginative. Catalogued a collection where there was something for all, embroidered jackets, obi-style belts, brocaded cloaks, and voluminous skirts, as if they were brought to life. 

Rasha Thadani and Ibrahim Ali Khan closed the show with old-world poise and new-world flair. It was a fitting finale—part history lesson, part fantasy film.

Aisha Rao — Wild at Heart

Making her ICW debut, Aisha Rao was the season’s freshest dream. Her collection Wild at Heart bloomed with lotus petals, banana leaves, and rose-gold mosaics—each appliqué whispering a kind of untamed tenderness. She layered nature into couture like a fable.

Sara Ali Khan was stunning in a beautiful Banarasi lehenga. Rao's world feels like a place where rebellion is subtle and fantasy is intricately woven with thoughtful details. The entire show was truly unforgettable.

Ritu Kumar – Threads of Time: Reimagined

A quiet storm came in the form of Ritu Kumar, one of the original matriarchs of Indian fashion. In Threads of Time: Reimagined, Kumar revisited and revitalized her archives, reworking iconic prints, paisleys, and kalidars for a new generation. It felt like a love letter to Indian textiles, with the wisdom of decades and the freshness of reinvention.

This wasn’t nostalgia—it was memory made malleable.

What We Saw, What We’ll Remember

This year, ICW saw a return to tactility. Couture was about touch—embroideries you could feel with your eyes, textures that moved like memories. There was structure, but also surrender. Motifs of roots, DNA, nature, and spirituality ran across collections like leitmotifs in a symphony.

We saw metallics meet brocade, corsetry meet kalidars, and flowers sprout from pleats. And above all, we witnessed a reclamation of Indian identity in high fashion—not as tokenism, but as a language only we know how to speak.

India’s couture scene is now more intimate and more international than ever before. With young voices like Aisha Rao stepping in with fresh fantasy and veterans like Rahul Mishra and Amit Aggarwal pushing boundaries between concept and craft, couture is evolving. Indian fashion today isn’t just bridal lehengas, it’s chronicles of the land, reflected in silhouettes and fabrics, expressed by the artists, with imagination for the bold futures.

The designers were encouraged to reflect, dream, and truly connect with their vision.

Read Bliss Foster's Notes on Spring 2024 Haute Couture Week in Paris


text by Bliss Foster

1. When we look at designers that are clearly a once-in-a-lifetime talent, we recognize them because they do far more than just make outstanding work — the difference between them and any other hardworking and apt fashion designer is that they have the confidence to go so far against the grain and know that they will be rewarded for it. And in John Galliano’s case this season, he leaned so far into his universe and embraced ideas whose execution would horrify most. But by marching to the beat of his own drum and embracing pubic wigs, John Galliano has enabled Maison Margiela to break through to the most mainstream attention through his portrayal of the most seedy and debaucherous Paris. The sheerest garments appeared muddied and tattered, distorting our perception of the body in a manner no different than the corsets in this show that were wrenched tight on the models. It takes a lot of work to make a gross bar the setting of something beautiful, but Galliano’s vision is so effective that he redeems this uniquely Parisian genre of hedonism: taking us from literal tatters to haute couture. It’s no surprise that the glass skin makeup, keyed by the legendary Pat McGrath, has managed to sell out every single product whose effect on the skin would even approximate what she created for the show. 

2. Simone Rocha’s stab at Jean Paul Gaultier couture was a large event for celebrities, which is a largely unexpected audience for the cult following of the coquette brand. But the standard JPG audience seemed thrilled - Simone’s clothing has that effect on people. Even if you’re not the kind of person that is inherently attracted to the overtly feminine, in the hands of Simone Rocha, bows become tears and frilly dresses can become a part of showcasing your cheerless attitude. Making exuberant clothing for people who can never be as spirited as their outfit implies is beautifully complex. The JPG cone bra is given a lift, turning into spiky rose thorns. Jean Paul’s tattoo exploration from Spring 1994 is reinterpreted into a sheer, organza pannier dress, trimmed with snakes, thorny branches, and roses. It’s not Rocha’s work without jewels and crystals, which created the structure of many tulle looks, but were notably present as eyeshadow and eyebrow adornment on the faces of many models. Likewise, it’s not a JPG show without the Marinière, whose stripes this season were piped with twisting bows made of navy satin ribbon. One of my favorite details were the sock-bun earrings, wrapped in hair. 

3. A poem accompanied Rahul Mishra’s couture show this season and, put succinctly, it was about appreciating the small things in life. The whole collection centered around this theme, further emphasized by the beautiful cards on the showgoers’ seats that listed the near extinction of many species of moth and butterfly. Couture has a radically different pace than the ready-to-wear calendar, and part of that includes a strange slowing down. When you have a chance to slow down, you can appreciate the incredibly intricate details that make Rahul Mishra’s haute couture such a compelling endeavor, while also digesting his discussion on biodiversity and the preservation of nature. The sheer circular shields carried by the models appear to invite us to look through the lens of a microscope and see the details of a dragonfly, a hive of bees, and the intricate patterns of a close-up honeycomb whose inspiration is spread across the entire collection. Honeycomb became crystal grids which were found on the most exciting looks in the collection.

4. The couture of Viktor and Rolf’s only raison d’etre is to bother purists who clutch their pearls about the beauty, grace, and exactitude of couture, and that is meant in the absolute best way possible. What makes V&R so special is their ability to communicate exactly what couture stands for in their luxurious, precise work, while thematically bucking every haute couture convention. The distinctive sound of scissors was turned into a walkable beat, while four looks traced the evolution of a gradual destruction and reconstruction via the very scissors the audience could hear loudly snapping away. Deconstruction itself is not easy to do well, thousands of designers try and fail at creating compelling designs through the use of deconstruction. Turning deconstruction into a sliding scale however is an entirely different goal. The in-between looks seem to capture the process of how they were created surprisingly well, but are also decorated with the motif of child-like scissor destruction, covered in the most lovely and professionally finished jagged holes.

5. Volume looks effortless when Gaurav Gupta does it, delicately swirling about the wearer, but this was a less voluminous show than usual for the brand. This season’s showing included evening jackets, trench coats and bronze bustiers, grounding this collection in a wearability that is not often seen in couture presentations. Gaurav’s devotees were dressed to the nines in his work, of course. It’s rare to see couture look so effortless and stunning on folks who aren’t walking a runway.

6. Miss Sohee’s couture radically modernizes the public’s expectation of what couture can look like. Yet, Sohee Park’s vision seems rooted in the most antiquated and vintage inspirations. Her collection was inspired by the old South Korean antiques she seems to adore, but it seems more than just inspiration. Each look appears to personify a particular and individual antique, and in this way, each look feels like a loveable, household object from Beauty and the Beast after they come to life. The cohesion in this collection is spectacularly strong while maintaining a large variety between the looks, almost as if the looks themselves are a perfectly curated shelf of objects. If Cristobal was alive today, it’s possible that some shapes in this collection would stir up some envy, most notably in the chartreuse-colored lamé gown.

7. Robert Wun’s fantasy horror show is sharp in all the right places. It’s a literal sharpness in the busts, peplums and some shoulders of these horror storybook characters. But more impressively, the execution of this collection left no detail unattended to, nothing was out of place. It’s not often you see such precision in just runway looks - usually that precision is much more expected, really demanded, in product. But being so up close to Robert Wun’s work reinforced a professionalism and an attention to detail that has left a lot to be desired from other couturiers. Every element was immovable and complete, a standard to only ever expect from the major luxury houses, and a standard that is often unfair to place onto emerging designers. But Robert Wun has been in business for 10 years, and he has experienced career highlights that emerging designers could only dream of. 

Couture From Home: An Inside Look At The Making Of Alexander McQueen's Pre-SS21 Collection

AMQ Team - NA_PHOTO-2020-05-15-11-56-08.jpg

As all offices, ateliers and factories were closed over lockdown, the Alexander McQueen design team were sent stock fabric to their homes, which was over-printed, over-dyed and renewed.

This collection harks back to the early days of McQueen and a free, make-do-and-mend spirit. Garments – from signature sharply cut masculine-inspired tailoring to prom dresses - were cut by hand at kitchen tables, fabric was dip-dyed in gardens. A mid-twentieth century silhouette – sweetheart necklines, soft shoulders and overblown skirts – is complimented by a hyper-feminine colour palette in shades of pink, from albion to fuchsia rose, and red, punctuated by classic black. Asymmetric hand-draped silks and exploded bows nod to the haute couture tradition finishing an audaciously romantic look.

Look 26
A dress with off-the-shoulder drape and a tiered skirt in washed silk organza dip-dyed albion pink and black.

look 27
A double-layered tuxedo jacket in black wool silk with a wrapped bow peplum in albion pink micro-faille and cigarette trousers in black wool silk with a black satin tuxedo stripe.

 
 

look 28 
An oyster ruffle dress with a high neck and scalloped back in washed organza dip-dyed albion  pink and black.

 
 

look 29 
An asymmetric, floor-length dress with an exploded skirt volume in washed calico silk organza with sketchbook hand embroidery over a skeletal corset in nude silk tulle. The embroidery was inspired by drawings in the notebooks of the Alexander McQueen design studio teams.

Read Our Review Of Vetements' Spring 2017 Couture Collection →

From the very beginning, Vetements connected with fashion lovers not because of how different it was, but because of how oddly familiar it is. Demna Gvasalia and his radical collective of European designers are primarily interested in the ways that mainstream products have been co-opted and used by various sub-cultures as signifiers, protectors, and weapons.  Demna will tell any interviewer that asks that Vetements is not a “conceptual” brand; that it’s really “just about clothes,” as the brand’s name would lead you to believe. But the fact of the matter, the “just clothes” mantra is conceptual in and of itself. Demna, and stylist Lotta Volkolva, use the identities of clothes to extrapolate ideas from them: a hoodie sized to this means X and jeans with this particular cut mean Y. It’s almost like the viewer or the wearer can project his or her own ideas onto the clothes, like a blank canvas. The skinhead and his bomber jacket, the DJ and his tracksuit, the model and her stilettos: Vetements constantly finds new ways of looking at products we’ve seen, and probably worn, 1000 times. Click here to read more.