Gaurav Gupta described himself as a continuum before his spring couture show and if you take a bird’s-eye view on the overarching narrative he built into the collection, so is everything.
Rooted in the Indian philosophy of “advait,” or the idea of an indivisible and nonbinary reality, it’s a line of thought that sprang from the coverage of his return to the runway last year after a devastating fire that left him and his life partner, poet and performer Navkirat Sodhi, with life-changing injuries.
Seeing her labeled as “his wife” had the couture designer questioning why people favor rigid binary structures — labels, definitions, identities, you name it — over ever-evolving ones.
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The pair even questioned time itself, he materializing it by watch movement parts used in place of sequins in embroideries, she by describing it as something that “exists only for those too caught up to create” in the poem that accompanied the opening look, a black dress that swept upward in Gupta’s recognizable architectural volumes worn by a glowing human silhouette.
From there began a chronology of everything in all its poetic and and spiritual breadth. The Big Bang and what followed was depicted with all-black looks with embroidered trails that evoked stardust.
Then came the emergence of life on Earth, one long white column dress looking like a flurry of flowers; another bristling with pseudo-reptilian scales. Later, he riffed on the emergence of spirituality, with a sculpture replicated from an Indian temple, carried by a model who wore a deceptively simple draped skirt.
Last came a gown made of several thousand resin elements, in changeant tones reminiscent of deep space photographs. With her face and hair painted to match, the model with her frank gaze seemed an otherworldly embodiment of the universe.
But set aside the philosophical and you still had striking silhouettes that spoke of his eye for form, fit — and flourish. It’s little wonder he has amassed a celebrity following that includes Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.
Backstage, he explained some of the legerdemain behind the looks. There was a newly developed thread technique that resulted in web-like lace used as a simile for energy flows. This culminated in a twin silhouette, with a pair of models walking hand-in-hand wearing two enmeshed dresses. Simpler but no less effective were the specially cut Plexiglas sequins that made a bustier minidress look like molten gold.
“This is what we came for,” said an editor as showgoers spilled out into the rainy Paris afternoon. Hear, hear.
