INDIA: FASHION

The Art of Heritage

How India Became the Definitive Artist of the 2026 Met Gala

Photo by Neon Wang on Unsplash

On the first Monday of May, the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art transformed into a living gallery. Guided by the spring exhibition “Costume Art” and the red-carpet dress code “Fashion Is Art,” the evening challenged global tastemakers to treat the human body as a three-dimensional canvas. The initial spectacle on the grand staircase is always the highlight of the evening, a public runway where the outfits command full attention. While much of the global delegation leaned heavily into literal historical copies, high-concept theatricality, and technological gimmicks, India systematically dismantled the traditional hierarchy of high fashion. From the hand-woven floor beneath the guests’ feet to the archives ascending the steps, the nation did not merely participate in the 2026 Met Gala; it established itself as the night’s definitive artist.

Once the arrivals conclude and everyone is inside, the grand public exhibition transitions into a regular dinner party. The intense focus on the wardrobe shifts as guests gather for a formal meal, curated performances, and private celebration away from the cameras.

The canvas underneath

Before a single flashlight went off, the evening’s foundation had already made its statement. For the fourth year running, the Met’s red carpet was hand-woven in Cherthala, a small town in Kerala’s Alappuzha district, by the eco-luxury studio Neytt.

The numbers alone tell a story: 73,625 square feet (6,840 square meters) of hand-sorted Madagascar sisal, woven in a tight bouclé construction sturdy enough to survive a night of stiletto heels, built by 500 local artisans over 90 days: the raw, pale off-white sisal was shipped to New York and hand-painted under strict secrecy to resemble a weathered stone pathway.

In its physical execution on the Met steps, the carpet abandoned the standard flat, bright crimson floor in favor of a textured, stone-garden pathway. The steps featured a striking hand-painted gradient, starting with a pale sandy stone texture at the bottom and gradually fading into an organic moss-green wash towards the top. Interspersed green streaks lined the painted mortar joints, giving the illusion of ancient, grass-sprouting cobblestones.

To the left of this path, a dense, manicured green hedge acted as a wall, dotted with clusters of flowering purple lavender in round, textured bronze-green planters. As guests climbed the staircase, their sweeping trains, such as a sheer, wet-look, sandy-beige gown with a long, flowing chiffon train gliding behind, brushed against the surface, showcasing the perfect harmony between the painted walkway and the garments on top of it. As Neytt co-founder Sivan Santhosh put it, the carpet is what elevates everything that happens on top of it. Before any gown appeared, South Indian weaving was already written into the architecture of fashion’s biggest night.

Isha Ambani: A saree as sculpture

Isha Ambani skipped the usual East-meets-West playbook entirely. With stylist Anaita Shroff Adajania and couturier Gaurav Gupta, she wore a traditional nine-yard saree draped into something closer to sculpture than clothing.

The fabric, a custom gold-threaded tissue base from the artisans at Swadesh, took more than 1,200 hours and 25 weavers to produce. Its border became a literal painted surface: Pichwai temple motifs and murals echoing the Ajanta caves, hand-painted over 150 hours by six artisans under Pichwai master Trilok Soni, then layered with dimensional relief stitching, zardozi, and aari embroidery. The blouse alone took 500 hours and 40 artisans, set with over 1,000 diamonds, emeralds, polki, and kundan stones, more than 1,800 carats drawn from her mother Nita Ambani’s private collection.

In physical form, Ambani’s look was a mesmerizing interplay of structural volume and raw jewel weight. The gold tissue saree was enveloped by a massive, golden organza-like cape structured around her upper body like a dramatic, wind-swept cloud or a translucent halo. Her bodice was a rigid, armor-like sculpture built from Nita Ambani’s personal jewel archive. Cascading strands of pearls and emerald beads draped over her upper arms like delicate sleeves, while she wore a thick, multi-layered diamond choker anchored by a colossal 50-carat square-cut emerald and large dangling diamond-and-emerald earrings.

Every accessory extended the theme. She carried a solid bronze mango-shaped clutch, designed by contemporary artist Subodh Gupta, nestled in a custom gold-crocheted net bag with a delicate hanging tassel. Her hair held a jasmine-inspired gajra sculpture built from paper, copper, and brass by Brooklyn artist Sourabh Gupta, while Gaurav Gupta’s signature resin-draped cape gave the whole look its final, cloud-like silhouette.

Karan Johar’s cinematic debut

For his first-ever Met Gala appearance, filmmaker Karan Johar turned to storytelling. Designed by Manish Malhotra and styled by Eka Lakhani, the look titled “Framed in Eternity” translated the 19th-century paintings of Raja Ravi Varma into wearable form.

A structured black jacket gave way to a six-foot trailing cape that functioned as a moving canvas, hand painted in acrylic and oil finishes to mimic actual brushwork. It depicted Varma’s mythological scenes Hamsa Damayanti, Arjuna and Subhadra, Kadambari, rendered with architectural pillars, lotuses, and swans. The borders sat on rubberized bases piled with zardozi to fake the raised texture of oil paint on canvas. Total build time: nearly 5,600 hours across 86 days, by a team of 80 artisans.

On the carpet, Johar carried this cinematic artwork with dramatic confidence. He wore an intricately embroidered gold-and-black high-neck tunic under his structured, wide-shouldered black velvet cape, which draped all the way to the floor. Massive gold-embroidered architectural pillars, three-dimensional lotuses, and sculpted celestial white swans with detailed, relief-embroidered wings emerged directly from the surface, creating an extraordinary three-dimensional effect. He completed this look with 24K gold-plated hexagonal Anna-Karin Karlsson Claw Plume sunglasses and a matching statement ring.

Even the jacket’s lining carried hidden hand-painted artwork. The entire outfit weighed an extraordinary 30 kilos — a physical burden that Johar, who weighs around 60 kilos, could barely bear, leaving him on the verge of collapse by the end of his red carpet walk.

Manish Malhotra’s tribute to the karigars

Malhotra dressed much of the room this year, but his own outfit may have been the sharpest statement of the night. In a classic bandhgala with a structured cape represents 960 hours of work by more than 50 artisans across Delhi and Mumbai, combining dori, zardozi, chikankari, and kasab techniques. He did something fashion rarely does: he signed the makers’ names directly into the fabric.

In an industry that has long celebrated designers while erasing the artisans behind them, embroidering the karigars’ names onto the world’s most-watched red carpet was a quiet but pointed correction. Malhotra himself stood as a testament to his own workshop, wearing a sharp, high-collared black silk bandhgala suit and tailored trousers, layered beneath his floor-length black velvet cape.

The cape was entirely covered in dense, white dori and zardozi embroidery depicting Mumbai’s iconic landmarks, including the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the Gateway of India, and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus alongside scenes of commuter trains and street life. Sculpted white-cord three-dimensional figurines of artisans were placed on the shoulders and cascaded vertically down the front, captured in the literal act of stitching and draping fabric. Heavy white thread fringe hung from the borders, dangling down to his ankles, turning the cape into a literal homage to his atelier. He completed his look with custom collar pins from his own High Jewellery collection.

The Trompe l’Oeil controversy

Model Bhavitha Mandava, who made history in late 2025 as the first Indian model to open a Chanel Métiers d’Art show, walked into the evening’s most contested moment. Her Chanel look: an oversized sheer blouse over relaxed blue jeans. Social media reacted fast and harshly, accusing Chanel of sending its first Indian ambassador out in "laundry day" casual wear while her peers wore traditional couture gowns.

​The backlash missed the point. Those weren’t jeans. They were silk muslin trousers, hand-painted over hundreds of hours to fake denim’s fade, grain, seams, and pocket lines, a trompe l’oeil piece built entirely to satisfy "Fashion Is Art". The outfit recreated, in couture form, the exact casual look Mandava was wearing when she was discovered in a New York subway in 2024.

On the staircase, Mandava carried her deceptive uniform with effortless grace. She wore a sheer, long-sleeved, pale beige quarter-zip blouse layered over a simple white scoop-neck top, paired with loose, light-wash denim-look trousers. The fabric trickery was so advanced that the silk trousers perfectly mimicked the faded grain, seams, and pocket lines of denim under the harsh camera flashes. She paired the look with classic Chanel black-and-white pointed pumps, a statement diamond ring, and elegant silver drop earrings, leaving her hair in natural, loose waves.

Read correctly, it was a sly meditation on class and illusion, arguably one of the night’s most conceptually rigorous entries, even as the initial uproar exposed how quickly South Asian representation still gets second-guessed.

A wide range of regional craft

Beyond the headline looks, India’s presence this year was anything but monolithic:

• **Ananya Birla:* With Robert Wun and stylist Rhea Kapoor, Birla delivered an avant-garde, industrial-inspired masterpiece. She wore a sharply tailored black blazer-style bodice in a silk-wool-cotton blend, featuring a heavily cinched waist, a dramatic flared peplum hem, and a crisp, office-wear light-blue cotton collar and cuffs peeking out. This was paired with a voluminous, pleated gunmetal-grey skirt crafted in a high-shine organza fabric that caught the light with a liquid, wet-look metallic sheen. Her entire head and face were covered by a striking, chrome-polished stainless steel and acrylic mask designed by Subodh Gupta. The mask was welded from traditional Indian kitchenware: small round katoris (bowls) clustered over her forehead, spoons overlapped to form her cheeks and nose, and a slotted serving spoon sat on her temple, leaving only a narrow, horizontal band open for her eyes. *These familiar utensils, which once symbolized utility in Indian kitchens, were reconfigured as armor in a brilliant, futuristic ode to heritage.
• **Sudha Reddy:* With Manish Malhotra and stylist Mariel Haenn, Reddy built her look around the “Tree of Life” motif, rooted in the Machilipatnam style of Kalamkari textile painting from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The gown featured a structured royal blue velvet corset bodice and a dramatic, sweeping train that took 3,459 hours of manual labor by 90 artisans to complete. She paired the gown with $15 million worth of high jewelry, featuring the “Queen of Merelani”. A massive, 550-carat deep violet-blue tanzanite stone.*
• **Princess Gauravi Kumari & Sawai Padmanabh Singh:** The Jaipur royal siblings turned the carpet into a heritage runway in custom Prabal Gurung couture.
• Princess Gauravi Kumari paid a demure tribute to her grandmother, Maharani Gayatri Devi. *She wore a custom saree-gown in a soft, delicate “Jaipur pink” hue, crafted from a lightweight, vintage chiffon saree that once belonged to Gayatri Devi*. Rather than a traditional drape, the sheer fabric was pre-structured to hug her body in soft, sculpted gathers at her waist and hips, cascading into a clean, minimal line over her shoulder. She styled the look with cascading, multi-layered pearl necklaces from The Gem Palace in Jaipur, a delicate kundan choker with red-and-green gemstone accents, uncut diamonds, rubies, and a classic Indian sheenpatti (hair chain) tracing her sleek, center-parted hair.
• Maharaja Sawai Padmanabh Singh *wore a striking “Phulghar” coat, a midnight-blue velvet desert-style quilted coat that took 600 hours of hand-embroidery by Jaipur-based artisans Yash and Ashima Tholia.* The back of the coat featured an embroidered mirror-sun motif inspired by the Sri Niwas at the City Palace of Jaipur, symbolizing his Suryavanshi lineage.

A shift in who gets to represent

This year marked a real change in how India showed up. In past years, the country’s Met Gala presence leaned heavily on Bollywood star power. Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone, and Alia Bhatt. Scheduling conflicts, from film shoots to press tours, kept all three away from this year’s carpet, and their absence sparked a wave of AI-generated fan images imagining the gowns they might have worn.

But without marquee celebrities to absorb the spotlight, the press had nowhere to look but the clothes themselves- the materials, the hours, and the hands behind them. Pichwai painting, Shola carving, and Kalamkari textiles: craft traditions carried the night on their own terms, with no need to borrow a Western silhouette for validation.

From the sisal carpet woven in Kerala to the diamond-set, hand-painted couture climbing the museum steps, the message was consistent. Heritage here wasn’t treated as something to preserve behind glass. It was worked, worn, and put back into motion, proof that the artisans themselves were the real authors of the evening.

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