At Paris Couture Week, Gaurav Gupta’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection, The Divine Androgyne, began with a misunderstanding. Last season, parts of the media referred to the couturier’s life partner, Navkirat Sodhi, as his wife. A casual label, but a telling one. Rather than correct it, Gupta sat with the question it raised: why are relationships, identities, even energies so often forced into binaries before they’re allowed to simply exist?
The Divine Androgyne unfolds as a response. Rooted in Advaita, the Indian philosophy of non-duality, the collection treats opposites not as conflicts but as co-dependents: time and space, body and consciousness, creation and dissolution. Gupta’s silhouettes are like living structures. Temple-like corsets, cosmic gowns, and crystallised forms that symbolise hovering between becoming and being.
Nature appears not as decoration but as architecture, with jasmine engineered into sculptural bridal forms and hybrid, almost extraterrestrial surfaces, imagining the earliest attempts of matter organising itself into life.
Images courtesy of Gaurav Gupta
