Inside the glamorous new Parisian-inspired occasion wear collection everyone’s talking about

Me. Honestly, it started with me. I kept returning to this idea of a woman who walks into a room and the entire room shifts — not because she’s trying, not because she’s performing, but simply because she cannot help it. That magnetic, effortless, completely unapologetic energy. I wanted to bottle that feeling and build an entire collection around it. The flagship, the Ball, the showcase—all of it was conceived as one unified world. I wanted every element to feel like it belonged to the same woman. Warm, dramatic, joyful, and very, very well-dressed. Everything else—the fabrics, the silhouettes, the embellishment choices—followed naturally from that starting point.

She’s someone I know very well. She’s been the muse since day one; she just keeps evolving. She’s deeply romantic, yes, but there is absolutely nothing soft about her. She has opinions. She takes up space. She orders dessert without checking with the table first. She gets dressed entirely for herself, and the fact that other people enjoy watching her do it is simply a bonus she has learned to accept graciously. This season, I gave her more feathers, more crystal, more volume. Not because she needed more—she never needed more—but because she wanted it. And I have never once argued with what she wants.

Paris has lived in my head, rent-free, for as long as I can remember, and I have absolutely no intention of evicting it. There is something about that city that understands glamour in the most instinctive way. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t explain. It simply exists, beautifully and without apology. The flagship at Ambawatta One is my love letter to Paris—plush armchairs, layered textures, warm light, the feeling of walking into a very beautiful French suite that also happens to sell the most extraordinary clothes you’ve ever seen. The collection carries that same spirit. I trained at Chelsea, I’ve shown at Paris Fashion Week, I’ve spent years absorbing that world, but Paris isn’t really a reference for me anymore. It’s become a feeling. And this collection is soaked in it.

This is the question I find most interesting because it assumes drama and wearability are in opposition, and they simply aren’t. The opposite of wearable is uncomfortable. The opposite of practical is restrictive. Drama is none of those things. Drama is a feather skirt that weighs almost nothing and moves as if it had a personality of its own. Drama is a crystal embellishment that catches light as you walk and makes you feel genuinely incandescent. Everything I make has to pass a very personal test: would I wear this for six hours at a party and feel as extraordinary at midnight as I did at eight? If the answer is no, it doesn’t go into the collection. The drama is entirely on purpose. The wearability is completely non-negotiable.

That dress is my design manifesto in a single look—everything I believe about fashion, everything the brand stands for, expressed in one extraordinary piece. All-over crystal and bead embellishment, a voluminous white ostrich feather skirt that moves with a life entirely of its own, a matching feathered cape collar, sheer gloves, silver heels. When it walked the space during the showcase, the room went very quiet for a moment, and then phones went up everywhere simultaneously, which I have decided is the modern equivalent of a standing ovation. I knew it was a key look the moment it came together in the studio because my immediate instinct was to wear it myself, right then. That’s always the test. If the designer wants to steal it from the model, the look is ready.

Because my woman asked me to—quietly at first, and then with increasing urgency over several years. She wears the brand to every cocktail party, to every pre-wedding dinner, to every event where she wants to feel completely herself. And then she’d come to me and say: “Pallavi, what do I wear to the sangeet?” And I didn’t have an answer. For a long time, I thought lehengas weren’t my language. And then I realised: they weren’t, yet. But everything I’d spent nearly two decades building—the 3D embroidery, the featherwork, the organza construction, the unapologetic drama—was exactly the language these lehengas needed. It wasn’t a pivot. It was the most logical next sentence in a story I’d been writing since 2007.

Absolutely, and it is the most exciting shift I have witnessed in Indian fashion in my nearly two decades in this industry. Women are done dressing for the occasion. They are dressing for themselves on the occasion. What’s new is that the culture is catching up to her now. The woman who wears a crystal feather mini to a cocktail party is no longer considered eccentric. She’s considered the best-dressed person in the room. I find that enormously gratifying.

They are the story. Full stop. I always begin with the embroidery, always. I build the surface first, then build the silhouette around it, because for me, texture and embellishment are not decorations applied to a garment.

Champagne. Always champagne. It is the colour of celebration without effort, of warmth and shimmer coexisting most effortlessly. It has a quality that makes the person wearing it look lit from within, and I find that endlessly compelling. And organza—forever, and always organza. There is genuinely nothing that organza cannot do. It floats, it structures, it holds embellishment, it moves with extraordinary grace, and in the right light, it looks almost alive. This season was very much about luminosity— everything glowing softly, everything with a shimmer that didn’t shout but simply existed. The entire collection has that candlelight quality. Warm, beautiful, and impossible to look away from.

Everything. Always everything. I grew up in Guwahati, surrounded by extraordinary natural beauty that sensibility for texture, for colour, for the way light falls on a surface, never left me, even when I was studying at Chelsea or showing in Paris. Travel is my greatest education: Paris for the romance and the understanding of effortless glamour, London for the structural discipline, India for the soul, the handicraft, and the colour. And then cinema—old Hollywood particularly, and French film — the kind of visual language where a woman walks into a frame and you genuinely forget the plot entirely because you cannot stop watching her. I want my clothes to do that. I want a woman to walk into a room and make everyone forget the plot.

Prices for the prêt pieces start at Rs 17,000.
Available online.

—manuvipin@newindianexpress.com

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