“Our beloved ones are no more lost to us when they die than if they were still laughing and loving and working and playing at our side,” wrote American author Helen Keller in her 1929 book “On Bereavement.”
The thought suffused Manish Malhotra’s Paris Couture Week debut on Tuesday, where he sent out a lineup intended as a love letter to his mother, who passed away shortly before he received his spot on the official calendar three months ago.
“I constantly feel that she’s here with me, and I miss her dearly,” he told WWD before the show. “For me, it’s something that I just wanted to say and feel in this collection.”
Her tastes and the nurturing, supportive bond they shared ran through a collection where he “tried to blend it all in a very contemporary moment.”
Opening the show was a dramatic crinkle-pleated opera-length coat that engulfed the body. It came adorned with figures that depicted the evolving relationship from toddler embraced by his mother to adult embracing her in return.
Early exits evoked that first all-encompassing connection as cocoon-like shapes that felt protective, such as a richly embroidered ovoid pink cape and a translucent soft yellow pleated jacket with a collar that extended upwards to hide the face.
Nodding to his late mother’s love of bangles, he imagined dresses modeled after arm stacks, their molded construction taking on a loose sci-fi vibe.
Nurturing bonds and the idea of blooming yielded a dress that looked like stylized petals shooting outwards; intricately knotted XXL silk cords that wrapped around the body and ended in cascades of golden thread, and later, broad shouldered looks that suggested someone grown strong enough to take on the world – or the red carpet.
Also not for wallflowers were the high jewelry pieces that were scattered in the lineup. These included an earcuff with 18-carat’s worth of diamonds and 8 carats of rubellite; a necklace with 170-carats of Mozambique rubies and 12 carats of white diamonds; a Art Deco-inflected collar necklace with 38 carats of diamonds and 46 carats of rubellites, and hand jewels inspired by the traditional haathphool.
After decades dressing Bollywood and building a large home market, Malhotra’s Paris debut with the story of the woman and bond that built him read like a prologue. The next chapters will tell what he does with the new global stage it earned him.
