💫 Becoming Love: How Rahul Mishra Undresses the Soul Through Haute Couture Sufism, sorrow, and sacred stitches—inside Rahul Mishra’s most personal Paris collection yet.

Vishal Khairnar

इस खबर को सुनने के लिये प्ले बटन को दबाएं।

By IndiaFashionIcon Desk

Most couture collections aim to dazzle—sculpting silhouettes that seduce, startle, or simply sell. But every once in a while, a collection comes along that doesn’t just dress the body—it undresses the soul. Enter Rahul Mishra’s ‘Becoming Love’, his 11th showing at Paris Haute Couture Week, and arguably, his most profound to date.

🕊 Couture Born from Grief—and Grace

Crafted in the quiet aftermath of his father’s passing, Mishra’s latest offering is less about fashion and more about feeling. With Tanishq as the jewellery partner, Becoming Love explores love as both transcendence and transformation, drawing heavily from Sufi mysticism and classical art—notably the golden, sensual strokes of Gustav Klimt.

In a conversation with ELLE India, Mishra put it simply:

“Grief, I believe, is love persisting.”

It’s this powerful truth that courses through every thread, sequin, and silhouette of Becoming Love—a spiritual and emotional roadmap of love in its most metaphysical form.

🌀 The Seven Stages of Love—Through Mishra’s Lens

In Sufi tradition, love is not a moment. It is a path, broken down into seven stages, each one deeper, harder, and more transcendent than the last. Mishra doesn’t just reference these—he builds entire worlds around them.

1. Dilkashi (Attraction)

The first bloom. Like a shy bud opening to sunlight, these garments are light, fluttering, and floral—whispers of something just beginning.

2. Ulst (Infatuation)

A fever dream of embroidery. Mishra uses pointillist needlework to mimic the rush of chemical emotion—the kind of love that keeps you awake at night.

3. Ishq (Love)

Here, garments take root. The designs are fuller, grounded, richer—like love that has moved from heady fantasy to enduring emotion.

4. Aqeedat (Reverence)

Inspired by Klimt’s sacred depictions of women, this stage honors the divine feminine. Drapes mimic altarpieces. Fabrics shimmer like relics.

5. Ibadat (Worship)

Love beyond the flesh. Mishra interprets this through weightless, celestial designs—nods to Krishna and Radha, love beyond the mortal plane.

6. Junoon (Obsession)

Here, silhouettes become more intense. Embellishments cluster, grow darker. There’s no softness here—only a restless, relentless devotion.

7. Maut (Death)

But death, in Mishra’s world, isn’t the end. It’s transmutation. The final garments are spectral, almost disappearing into themselves. Love doesn’t leave. It lingers.

✍️ The Collection as Confession

This isn’t couture made to trend. It’s couture made to heal.

Mishra treats fashion not as product, but as poetry. In a world chasing virality, his work insists on stillness. And through the process of designing Becoming Love, he admits he was designing through something, not just for something.

“It was like crafting seven collections in one,” he tells ELLE.
“Each stage has its own soul, its own stitching language.”

💍 Details, Devotion & Divine Embroidery

With Tanishq’s fine jewellery acting as spiritual punctuation marks—jhumkas for Junoon, chokers for Ibadat—the collection felt both deeply Indian and universally human. Mishra’s team of karigars once again pushed the limits of slow couture, creating pieces that felt like living altars to love in all its maddening, mystical forms.