Couture Across the Flame: Gaurav Gupta SS25 Haute Couture

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Last year, Indian designer Gaurav Gupta’s atelier was swallowed in flames, the providence of a gently wisping candle lighting a shadow-licked corner. Gupta sustained injuries on his hand trying to douse its eye-blink, cancer-like growth; his wife - the poet Navkirat Sodhi, whom Gupta incants as his “twin flame” in his manifold old interviews - suffered life-threatening burns to 55% of her body, a coin toss’s odds of survival.  

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Eight months later, they sat down to record an interview. “The scars will go,” Sodhi smiles, fire-lashed but tenderly alive, “[or] some will go, some will stay. But what remains, what we need to stick to… is love.” This was to be the film-camera prelude to Gupta’s triumphant, phoenix-like return to couture - “Across the Flame”, a sartorial tale of trauma, resilience, and rebirth.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

In the silken, softly damp black of Paris’s Bridge Club, Sodhi emerged from heavy-bodied curtains to open the show. “Taller than you is your mind, smaller than you is your pain.” She recited her mantras, poems written in the wake of her hospitalisation. Draped gently in skin-toned, gossamer fabric, her skin bears all its traumas and scars as she transmogrifies experience into words, affirmations and spells. “Taller than you is your mind, smaller than you is your pain.”

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

The poetics of the show was unrelenting. At the level of colour, blacks opened the show to evoke the dearth of death and loss, yet worked in ambivalent sympoeisis with sumptuous gold details, headpieces, jewellery, and arabesques, perhaps as the destructive and deceitful glow of the fire, or perhaps as the glimmering potentiality of a life beyond it. A cankled gold breastplate, occupying a space somewhere between the anatomic and the mythic, affixes to a black velvet ensemble, gesturing either to a desire for protection or a desire for somatic rebirth (why not both?). The show is heavy with affective meaning without that meaning ever becoming tyrannical or burdening. Gupta both tells his story and leaves semiotic gaps onto which watchers might impress their own tales, opening a chance for them to their own traumas and rebirths like a therapist leaving a silence after forming a thought on their tongue. Taller than you is your mind.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Fire nonetheless engulfs the show: through vibrant ochres or ashen whites, in the ethereal liquidity of the satins or tulles that wisp in the models’s wakes like smoke in skywards rivulets or ash pirouetting mindlessly on the zephyr’s hum. Rich midnight blues and purples are also digested into the show’s visual language, the black and blue of blistered and burnt flesh growing organically into gowns and dresses and gems and brocade.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Yet, these visceral colours are also cosmic, transcendental, and beyond-the-body. One model is swallowed in blue, their face-painted visage hugged by a softly bouncing headpiece and their chest castellated by an iridescent space-blue armour. It’s hard not to imagine Navkirat in this look, in a sense both physical and metaphysical. “She is… the goddess,” Gupta praises her; “[t]he headgear… is a sculptural interpretation of cosmic symbolism, drawing from our shared experiences of astral projection, where we felt our spirits transcend earthly limitations. It’s almost as if these pieces are visual extensions of our journey through the stars and into another realm [together].”

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Or to see her in Gupta’s “Twin Flame” look, in which a pair of models were sewn to one another in fiery ochre silk, as if walking together through the inferno. Or in the closing look, a structural black gown with comet-patterned inseams, the wearer’s skin drowned in Preciosa crystals as if that regrown after the flames, wounded and beautiful. Or, truth be told, to see her in everything presented, such is the power of her vitalistic presence, of Gupta’s vitalistic love for her. This was a show that clings both to pasts and to futures to take couture and luxury beyond their oft-faced accusations of vanity or frivolousness. This was couture as poetry, as a transcendental testament to survival and love; couture across the flame. 

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)