Sabyasachi Mukherjee has entered into a multi-year partnership with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This collaboration will see the Indian couturier mine 5,000 years of art history for a series of jewellery, accessories, and clothing collections in the years ahead.
The announcement, which was made on Tuesday, places Sabyasachi not only as a visitor to the Met's famous front steps every May but also as a creative interpreter of its permanent collection. This is one of the most important honours the organisation bestows upon a living designer, and it is uncommon for an Indian couturier on this scale. On September 15, at New York Fashion Week, the partnership's first phase will make its debut with a high jewellery collection that is solely inspired by Byzantine art and material culture.
Working across the Met's departments of Greek and Roman, Medieval, and Islamic art, Sabyasachi’s team pulled reference points from imperial medallions, funerary reliefs, ancient statuary, and religious iconography, reworking them into wearable form. Among the pieces: gold cuffs set with garnet and tourmaline cabochons that echo the carved lions of a third-century Roman sarcophagus, and pendant necklaces layering tourmaline, jasper, lapis lazuli, and jade in homage to Byzantine funerary art. Every piece will be handcrafted by artisans in India.
For Sabyasachi, the choice of Byzantium was personal as much as art-historical. He has spoken of finding an echo of his native Calcutta in the empire's identity as a crossroads shaped by trade, migration, and the exchange of ideas across continents — India included. The collaboration, in his telling, is as much about excavating a shared history of craftsmanship as it is about jewellery.
For The Met, the partnership fits a broader strategy of inviting contemporary makers to reanimate the permanent collection for new audiences. Stephen Mannello, the museum's Head of Retail and Global Licensing, framed the collaboration as a chance to view centuries-old objects freshly — antiquity refracted through a living designer's sensibility rather than kept behind glass.
Sabyasachi has dressed a string of red-carpet arrivals at the Met Gala in recent years, including Alia Bhatt's widely photographed sari moment at the 2024 “Sleeping Beauties” gala and Shah Rukh Khan’s Met Gala “Black Dandyism” debut look in 2025. The Byzantine collection will roll out at Sabyasachi's global flagship stores following its September runway debut.
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