Gustav Klimt loomed large over Rahul Mishra’s fall 2025 couture collection, presented Monday during Paris Haute Couture Week.
Mishra translated Klimt’s lush symbolic language—gold-leaf decadence, layered faces, and sensual mystique—into 30 looks that seemed to step directly off the canvas and onto the Paris runway.
“What struck me most was how rarely his subjects looked directly out of the canvas. Their eyes were often closed or averted, as if they were lost in another world, Mishra told Vogue India. “I’ve admired Klimt for years, but interestingly, I’d never consciously translated his influence into any of my work until now.”
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Mishra is a Delhi-based designer, who won the International Woolmark Prize in 2014 at Milan Fashion Week; he was the first Indian designer to do so.
The designer, presenting his fourth collection in Paris, rendered Kilmt’s motifs using traditional Indian embroidery and clothing-making techniques like zardozi and dabka. According to India Today, the collection took over 2,000 artisans to create.
The opening look—and perhaps the most striking—a sweeping gold sculptural dress shaped like a heart, which displayed veins throughout and which was centered by a sequined corset.
“It somehow reflected attraction, love or maybe reverence also,” Mishra told Women’s Wear Daily of Klimt’s women. “They carry something which is a kind of mystery.”
Another theme running through the collection was the seven stages of love from Sufi philosophy—attraction, infatuation, love, trust, worship, madness, death. In between, a surreal garden bloomed: lotus flowers burst from stem-like bodices, and gowns shimmered with finely embroidered florals, their surfaces rich with texture and quiet drama. Klimt’s influence surfaced again in gold hues and swirling patterns, and in the dreamlike multiplicity of faces—love as a collage of memory and identity.
There were firsts, too. Mishra teamed up with milliner Stephen Jones, who topped off the looks with cloudlike tulle creations—part halo, part hallucination.
“Love is constant, it stays on forever,” Mishra said backstage. His vision this season suggested something more layered: love, like art, doesn’t just endure—it transforms.