Sabyasachi Mukherjee has always had a very strong idea of what he likes. Bengal, old jewellery, heavy textiles, antiques, paintings, tigers, art, a slightly obsessive love for collecting. He has spent 25 years building a world around these things and, somehow, made that world feel aspirational to several generations of Indians.
That, to me, is what makes him interesting even now. Fashion keeps changing its mind about what is cool, but Sabyasachi rarely seems to change his. There is a stubbornness to it that I like. He has never tried to make his India smaller, cleaner or easier to digest, either for an international audience or an Indian one. He has taken all the things he loves and built a house around them. And now, after years of doing exactly that, he has taken that very specific point of view back to New York.
New York, The Sabyasachi Way
Yesterday’s New York Fashion Week show was, in his words, not a debut but a comeback. Twenty years after his first New York presentation, Sabyasachi returned with Bengal Byzantine Broadway, a 72-look Spring/Summer 2027 collection that was surprisingly relaxed for a designer whose name is practically synonymous with embellishment. Anyone expecting an endless procession of lehengas and sarees was looking for the wrong thing. This was sleek, easy and distinctly American in parts, while still unmistakably Sabyasachi.
Christy Turlington opened the show in layered denim (surprised us all right!) and an enormous gold pendant from Sabyasachi’s new fine-jewellery collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were jeans, denim vests, plaid shirts, wrap skirts, tailored jackets and cowboy hats alongside bandhgalas and sarees, all punctuated by Indian crafts and his characteristically oversized jewellery.
The contrast was the fun part. A pair of jeans remained a pair of jeans until Sabyasachi put an enormous gold cuff next to it. A cowboy hat sat over Indian jewellery and an intricately embroidered jacket. A plain saree came with his tiger-logo cummerbund and a long trench.
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It was also a useful reminder, particularly for an international audience, that Sabyasachi is more than bridal lehengas (which might be a hard-to-digest pill for some). The collection simply assumed that Indian craft could sit next to denim, Western tailoring and American references without needing a footnote.
Perhaps that is the biggest difference between Sabyasachi in 2006 and Sabyasachi in 2026. He is no longer going to New York asking what an Indian designer should look like there. He went with a house that already knows exactly what it is.
His Delhi Store Might Be The Clearest Explanation Of Why
If the New York collection shows where the house is going, the new Delhi flagship explains where it came from.
The 26,000-square-foot Mehrauli store is essentially the Sabyasachi universe made physical: around 120 chandeliers, nearly 200 antique carpets, more than 100 antique textiles, paintings, mirrors, porcelain, furniture, a life-size Bengali tiger inside a recreated Calcutta tram, a black panther and a labyrinth of rooms referencing everything from old North Calcutta homes to railway carriages and Kashmir houseboats.
Around 300 original works from the Sabyasachi Art Foundation sit throughout the store. He describes the aesthetic as ‘organised clutter’, which may be one of the most Sabyasachi phrases ever. I understand exactly what he means. Indian homes have spent years being accused of having too much stuff while a European apartment with twenty paintings, three antique cabinets and a chair nobody is allowed to sit on gets called character.
Sabyasachi has never made that distinction. He likes things. He likes old things. He likes collecting them and putting a lot of them together. More importantly, he has made that taste look expensive and increasingly cool.
My mother is proof. I blame Sabyasachi every time another collectable appears in our house.
The excess is hardly random, though. Behind it sits an ecosystem of artists and craftspeople. Sabyasachi has said that when he builds stores, one of his first questions is how many people the space can employ, from glassmakers and chandelier makers to carpet makers, stonemasons and furniture makers.
That might be the more interesting way to understand his version of luxury. The fantasy gets you through the door, but a very real network of people builds it.
He Has Opinions. Actual Opinions.
Sabyasachi rarely gives interviews, so when he does speak, people tend to listen.
He talks about fashion, obviously, but he also talks about employment, museums, craft, manufacturing, Indian luxury and building a company capable of outliving him.
What I enjoy is that his answers do not always feel as though they have passed through twelve rounds of brand approval. Sometimes he is precise. Sometimes he goes off on a tangent. Sometimes you are left wondering where the answer is going. I enjoy all three. can be intense, slightly unhinged and very sure of himself, and most importantly, very unapologetic!
At his Delhi store, after speaking to the media for the first time in a while, he also made a point of telling everyone to check out the bathrooms. He has a great playlist too!
I wish more fashion designers still sounded this much like themselves.
The Brand Let People In Without Becoming Ordinary
For years, Sabyasachi was the bridal brand most people admired from a safe financial distance. But he also understood fairly early that people wanted a piece of the world he had built, even if they would never buy the bridal lehenga.
The H&M collaboration in 2021 was the obvious turning point. H&M’s first collaboration with an Indian designer took Sabyasachi’s prints, embroidery and maximalism to a global audience, including people who would never have walked into a couture appointment. For a designer who had largely been associated with high-end Indian bridalwear, it was a very different kind of visibility.
Then came more accessible jewellery, Starbucks drinkware and other entry points into the brand. These collaborations are wildly different from each other, and the interesting part is that none of this seems to have made the central house feel less exclusive.
You may never order the saree or own one of those enormous jewellery pieces. But you can recognise the Bengal tiger, know the campaigns, visit the store, buy a smaller collaboration, and have a very strong opinion about all of it.
I am a perfect example. I have spent years admiring Sabyasachi and still cannot casually walk into the store and say, ‘I’ll take that.’ But I know exactly what I would look at.
So Where Does Gen Z Come In?
This is where the original question becomes interesting.
Gen Z has grown up with an absurd amount of access to fashion. We can see a runway five minutes after it happens, pull up a designer’s archive, identify the reference and then spend half an hour arguing about whether somebody copied it. Although Gen Z is not particularly a target demographic for luxury brands, their loud opinions do influence overall brand sentiment and discourse.
It is also a generation suspicious of brands trying too hard to be relevant. And Sabyasachi does not seem particularly interested in trying. He does not suddenly make everything younger. He does not flatten the brand into internet-friendly content. He does not seem desperate to appear accessible. His stores remain intimidatingly luxurious. His clothes remain expensive. His world remains very specifically his.
Perhaps that is exactly why younger audiences remain interested.
He is also willing to take risks. He has spent years making decisions that could easily have gone very wrong. His early Lakmé Fashion Week shows were not exactly exercises in playing it safe, neither was his first New York presentation nor was this NYFW show. He has also never been afraid of being a little too much.
There is something compelling about somebody who simply does what he wants. We have grown up watching brands chase relevance at frightening speed. Sabyasachi has spent 25 years doing almost the opposite.
He built a point of view and waited for people to come to it.
They did.
Maybe ‘Cool’ Was The Wrong Question
I started this piece wondering whether Gen Z actually thinks Sabyasachi is cool. Somewhere along the way, I realised that ‘cool’ is probably the wrong question.
What makes Sabyasachi interesting is that he has never needed to behave like a cool brand. He is too opinionated for that. Too stubborn about what he likes. Too invested in India and too comfortable with the fact that his version of India can be excessive, complicated and occasionally completely bonkers.
From New York denim piled with Indian jewellery to a Delhi store filled with chandeliers, tigers and antique carpets, the language changes but the world remains remarkably consistent. Perhaps that is his real trick. Sabyasachi has spent 25 years refusing to chase relevance and, in doing so, has made every new generation curious about the world he built anyway.
And that world is still expanding. The house is now working on its first fragrance, expected within the next 18 months, which leaves one very Sabyasachi question hanging: what does he think India smells like? Oud, rose, incense, something woody? Hopefully, something a little stranger. A predictable ‘Indian luxury’ fragrance would almost be too easy.
That, perhaps, is why ‘cool’ was always the wrong question. He has spent 25 years making his own version of India desirable without asking anyone else what it should look, feel or, soon enough, smell like.
Also Read,
Sabyasachi Mukherjee: The Reigning Emperor Of Indian Fashion
