Rahul Mishra called his dazzling couture collection for spring 2025 “The Pale Blue Dot.” He was struggling as a father and as a son thinking of issues impacting the world and especially cities, including pollution, due largely to man-made climate change.
“Suddenly, what happens when these cities become ghost towns?” mused Mishra. “These are just dark cities.”
Channeling this notion, the Indian designer’s show opened with a sweeping black cape made of cuboids built from shimmering silver-colored squares, reminiscent of a bird’s-eye view of an urban landscape. A series of looks in various silhouettes then riffed on that theme: take the strapless sculptural knee-length dress or the sheath dress in the same material.
Mishra then crafted cityscapes in more shimmering silver, to brighter effect, and added touches of green to connote vegetation growing back. “Nature is taking over,” he said.
Round mirrors adorned another sequence of dresses. One look was composed of circles in which world monuments, such as the Eiffel Tower and Taj Mahal, were embroidered and looked to be overgrown with plants. The head of the model wearing it could be seen through a round frame around which words wrote out: “Objects in this mirror are closer than they appear.”
To denote winged scavengers who help clean up the planet, Mishra fashioned garments off of which bird motifs appeared to fly. One had them looped twice around the front of a black body suit.
As his message became ever more optimistic and utopic, gold color infuses clothes, like the minidress featuring an embroidered domestic scene, with a deer curled up on the bed, as seen through the panes of a window.
“It’s a difficult narrative to look at Earth, life, sustainability — all these issues,” said Mishra. “We struggle, definitely, to deliver a message through clothes. You could write a poem, it’s easier. You can do a writeup.
“It was very, very important for us to actually look at,” said Mishra.
