From the way the clothes gazed at the global market, the collection communicated that Sabyasachi is looking at the “next 25 years”.
Those who saw an expression of contradictions in couturier Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s grandest of grand shows—that marked 25 years of his design economy—missed the point. These “opposites” were of course deliberately curated all over the hotly discussed celebration at Mumbai’s Jio World Convention Centre last Saturday—its echoes still bellowing into META algorithms.
Some parts of the set symbolised the Raj Baris of a bygone era, now regressing into community living spaces, with worn-out clothes left to dry outside. Other elements stood for the arduous divide between the designer’s middle-class roots and his anything-but-middle-class stature today. Classical Bengali music inching toward a playlist of 1980s musical hits from Hindi cinema. An arresting display of jewels emerged from decadent pasts, where the decay of the past itself added intrigue.
From limited-edition jeans made in Japan—ostensibly minimalistic—to hair-raising couture created like ostentatious jewellery. From caviar to architectural symbolism, the evening’s composition represented a culturally cacophonous Calcutta life. The Bengal Tiger’s ubiquitous presence (“the tiger belongs to all of us,” says the designer) appeared in interpretative ways, while the guest list encoded a power play.
If you pay attention to Sabyasachi speaking, he tells you about his two grandmothers. One who taught him the vanquishing powers of minimalism and the other who swathed him in maximalist imagination.

However, these are not ‘contradictions’. They are characters from the same linear story. Sabyasachi is showing us his life—its movement from one point to another. From “two eggs a week per family” to becoming the only luxury brand from India with a global presence. The brand is now headed for Rs 500 crore revenue in 2025. In 2021, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited acquired 51 per cent of Brand Sabyasachi.
Sabyasachi uses history, biography, and fecundity to sketch his narrative. The history of a culturally and intellectually rife Calcutta. Biography—his own, serving as a visual resume of his work and life. Fecundity—a lavish show to convey successful regeneration of fashion and craft through cultural affinity that is possible to do within India. Enticingly, it is not colonial or simplistically post-colonial. It is emphatically post-Independence—a story of liberalisation and independent will in the face of business-building challenges.
Here is what Sabyasachi is telling us: if this is what I can do as a once-poor Bengali boy, this is what India can do. Listen to me, don’t just admire or wear me. I am a cause, not a because. He may pepper his positioning with words like “idealism”, “cerebral sophistication”, humility, or “conflict and debate”. But there is no conflict here.

The party
The designer, who once splashed the country with riotous bridal colours and styling, requested a strictly black dress code for what was being dubbed “Sabyasachi’s NMACC gala”. It was his way of communicating that while the Ambani family—backers of the glamourously stylised and globally covered launch of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in 2023, and the buyers, purveyors and promoters of India’s most expensive fashions—may have their own band of Indian designers, he is a one-man army who can turn heads and stir hearts.
He did.
The event, months in the making, was contoured with themes of class disparities in Indian life and the idea of classiness. The black turnout was ragingly beautiful—some styles so sophisticated, some jewellery so resplendent and seductive, they seemed impossible to achieve without personal fashion heft or days of recruited styling rigour. Sonam Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Ananya Panday, all dazzled in different forms of black. But the uniformity of the dress code, as Sabyasachi said later, was intended so that everyone melded into one. So that only his clothes stood out above the power and social vanity of his guests.
The best dressed? I would vote for the Bengal tiger—who, through Sabyasachi’s coding, unleashes the vision of an ambitious lion in the viewer’s mind.

The collection, history of Sabyasachi
Some observers said they were “underwhelmed” by the clothes on the ramp. Others expected bigger stars—or “mothers”, as they are Oedipally referred to in fashion’s unguarded metaphors—to open and close the show. Many wondered if Sabyasachi’s bridal couture would eclipse other design milestones of his body of work. But the collection, almost 158 pieces long, which took six months to make, (though it could have certainly done better with an edit in the number of looks and the styling impulses), was how he recalls his 25 years in fashion.

From the way the clothes gazed at the global market—many sidelining India in form and elements, yet rooted in embroideries, weaves, the use of textiles, and dexterously constructed inners as luxury—communicated that Sabyasachi is looking at the “next 25 years”. The past was styled with the future in mind. It also upheld the ponderous present. Slogans like ‘Where has all the Love Gone’; ‘Cat Lady’, ‘Table for One’ emblazoned on clothes, referenced street style and the threatened paradise of the young in 2025.
Actor Deepika Padukone was almost unrecognisable (that’s how fashion should recruit celebrities, without self-imposing personalities anyway) in her white ensemble with black gloves and nerdy spectacles. Supermodel Christy Turlington did not look like one of her fashion magazine covers including the ones where she has worn Sabyasachi in the past. She was a towering woman of substance whose tall jewels didn’t quite eat her up.

The show offered flashes of almost everything in Sabyasachi’s design and couture past. From Kashgar Bazaar, his debutant collection at Lakme Fashion Week 2002, to Nair Sisters and Peeli Kothi—where Shubha Mudgal sang live for the first time for a designer—several other milestones, including his film work. There was also the expected resurgence of his known references: thick spectacles, nods to Rabindranath Tagore, Charles Dickens, Frida Kahlo’s headgear, and Madonna’s bejewelled crucifix. Gayatri Devi and Coco Chanel joined the fray too. They played hide-and-seek in his maximalist mix, blurring into composites, like a literary protagonist built from several complex narratives.
There was fecundity everywhere—velvets and cottons, androgyny and wokeism, some saris, goddess idealisation, and Kolkata’s Mallick Ghat and College Street. There was so much of everything that holding on to something specific was a challenge. The clothes spoke so many languages that the Bengali voice came to the drowning brink, especially in the spectator’s mind. Sabyasachi’s high jewellery unquestionably stood out.
Where is the contradiction? Here is an artist and thinker who is showing us what a good business mind he has and why brand building from Kolkata to New York is not all about design and cannot be narrated without personal brutalism. So, he first rips himself down to a humble Kolkata boy, then builds and bloats this idea into what is now recognisable as “Sabyasachi culture”.