Rahul Mishra Spring 2022 Couture Collection

Rahul Mishra is not about to let COVID slow him up—he caught it, and so did his entire family, but fortunately everyone recovered and now he’s doubling down. Recently, the designer purchased land in the biodiverse Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, India. His dream house—a self-sufficient, fully sustainable home and artistic studio—is still just an image in his mind’s eye, but that didn’t stop him from putting the glass-walled structure on his mood board, surrounded by the lush valley of flowers and the mountain view he soon hopes to call home for a good part of the year. The air is so pure there, he offered, it’s possible to hand sew by the light of the moon. He also wants to build a flower farm.

All that is why he entitled this collection Enchanted. Being a nature lover, he started with the view, collecting images of indigenous flowers, plants, and monarch butterflies. For weeks, he imagined what it might look like to live far from any man-made source of light. “There is so much to listen to and look at up there,” he said over Zoom.

Back in the studio, the flowers he snapped with his iPhone were transformed into embroideries that look astonishingly true to life. In one instance he showered them over a racerback tulle gown, a piece that took approximately 2,000 hours to make. Elsewhere, he went macro, magnifying blooms and using “the flower as form” for short dresses made of tiers of petals. Those are as light as sweatshirts, he said. He also scaled flowers down on a few numbers that treat clothing as a canvas for a landscape view—for example, an evening coat with billowing sunrise-hued sleeves and a horizon line at the waist.

Likewise, the night sky became a voluminous, bubble-like top over a long column skirt that looked like an exotic garden in full bloom. A confection in orange tulle came alive with butterfly appliqués; paired with sequined trousers, it made a bid for nonbinary dressing. A certain kind of femme-fleur will delight in the riot of color, although some of the landscapes were more wearable than others.

By his own admission, Mishra lives in a fantasy world, but it’s working well for him. In short order, he has built the kind of business that might make a Parisian couturier green with envy. Orders have doubled since the early days of the COVID era. Last season, he landed an astonishing 20 magazine covers in China alone. In December, he acquired a new 50,000-square-foot factory in the Noida suburb of New Delhi for his approximately 300-strong team—but that’s only a fraction of his 1,000-plus employees, most of them artisans working in small villages. And there are a few other projects in the works, including a possible return to ready-to-wear. “I’m interested in moving beyond the established order of things,” he said. Stay tuned.