Swirl domination: How Gaurav Gupta’s gowns took over global fashion
It’s Gupta’s year. His gowns have shown up at the Oscars, Grammys and Paris Couture Week. How to run a global empire from Noida? Burst out of your own seams
“When you wear Gaurav Gupta’s clothes, you get sex!” Gupta, 44, knows exactly what his designs do for chic international celebrities and picky Indian brides. “Our clothes are made on scientific principles and are very flattering – everybody looks taller, leaner and sexier. They play up the fantasy angle. They make people want to give you love bites,” he says.
People have been giving Gupta’s work more than love bites. In the last year and a half, they’ve sent out a clear kiss of approval. More than 100 international celebrities have worn Gaurav Gupta’s signature gravity-defying waves, curlicues and cinched designs. They’ve popped up on red carpets and performance stages; music videos and fashion show front rows; A-list weddings and glittering parties.
Megan Thee Stallion wore his Fantasy Biomorphic Gown (slate-blue, body-hugging, a dramatic train flowing out like waves) to the Oscars in 2022. At this year’s edition, NTR Jr wore a sleek black sherwani bearing a fierce embroidered tiger. Cardi B has been photographed in custom Gaurav Gupta designs multiple times, most memorably at the Grammys red carpet this year, in an electric-blue gown that swept around her waist to suspend delicately around her shoulders and head like a gauzy hood. Beyoncé, who rarely repeats designers within a short span, wore his designs three times on her ongoing Renaissance World Tour. She’s performed in a custom-made shimmering white bodysuit, and two gowns straight off Gupta’s Paris runway. Jenna Ortega, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Jennifer Hudson, Lizzo, Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra have all been showing off his creations.
Gupta launched his eponymous label in 2005. His work, over the years has become bolder, freer, more distinctive, drawing as much from artists, designers, businessmen, social workers as Ancient Egypt, India, and Mesopotamia, and even meteors and mathematical principles. (His Paris Couture Week debut collection was called Shunya or zero.) “It’s what made me stand apart in this industry and has helped me scale up.” he admits. It’s also why this particular moment in time is undoubtedly his.
STITCH IN TIME
“My mind was always like this,” Gupta says. “As a child, I could be lost in a leaf for hours. I’ve snorkelled for six hours and had my back sunburned, jumped out of a safari car to run after animals. I feel like I don’t have any inhibitions or fears. I only fear myself and my madness and perhaps the loss of my loved ones.”
That passionate streak meant he had deplorable grades at Springdales School, Delhi. He even flunked sixth grade. “But I was the best at everything creative. I was making these amazing sculptures with our art teacher; I was the best dancer in our year.” It was no surprise then, that he enrolled at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in 1997, doing well enough to follow up with a Master’s degree at London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins in 2001.
Fashion folks caught on early. Gupta won the Makuhari Grand Prix Fashion Award in Tokyo in 2000. His capsule collection of six garments based on Indian surrealism won him the Future of Couture trophy at Rome’s celebrated fashion week, in 2003. He wasn’t sure about starting his own label until his brother Saurabh Gupta convinced him to return to India so they could do it together. He started off in 2003, creating cloth for family and friends, launching his eponymous label in 2005.
Gupta first showed the fluid looks that were to become his signature style, in 2010. He didn’t stick to a colour palette (“Couture collections don’t go by definitions”). It was so out of the box that critics heralded him as the designer to watch. He worked quickly, making the sari sexy by pleating it, knotting it, re-shaping, re-draping, and re-doing it until the hybrid drapes became a favourite with both modern fashionistas and their traditional-minded mothers.
It’s hard to think of a Gaurav Gupta gown, particularly one that shows up at the Grammys or on Saturday Night Live as essentially Indian. And yet, he says that most of his works are developed on the sari drape before they take on their dramatic sculptural forms. “I like to call it ‘future primitive’. Any of my garments could be placed in a futuristic sci-fi film or in a historical setting,” he says. “This isn’t intentional, it’s just who I am. I don’t belong to ‘now’ or a fixed time. I don’t even think I belong to I.”
REACHING OUT
He certainly belongs to the world. Cardi B’s stylist Kollin Carter first called Gupta’s team out of the blue last year. “He had seen one of our older designs. He wanted to create a moment with Cardi for her upcoming music video, so we custom made her garment,” says Gupta. The body-hugging ivory gown, with a high side-slit, long train and petal-like hood, appears in the remix of her video for No Love. Then, Carter attended Gupta’s Paris show on January 26 this year, and approached the label four days later for a custom design inspired by an outfit he had seen on the runway. This was for the Grammys on February 6. “We didn’t sleep for five days, but it was totally worth it!”
At Gupta’s five-floor atelier in Greater Noida, dozens of craftsmen bring to life his intricate designs. Helpers mould wiring into unusual shapes and pin half-done garments on to mannequins. Tailors frantically sew and re-sew shimmery fabric. Some outfits, such as Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s pink gown at Cannes 2022, can take 20 days and 100 craftspeople to create. A large administrative team keeps track of it all. It’s one part of the business he’s gladly handed over to his brother, Saurabh Gupta to handle. “I’m so fortunate to have him involved,” the designer says. “He brings structure to the company… to this madness… to me!”
Meanwhile, Indian clients have been queuing up at his studio, getting ready for the wedding and festive months ahead. Gupta enjoys meeting them, he says. “They will ask me if they look nice in that shade of yellow, and I won’t hesitate to tell them that they don’t!” It’s been a busy few years and it’s about to get busier. “I look like a party person, but I haven’t had a drink in month. It feels great! I want to be healthy because there’s so much more to do in life.”
