'DEVI' Carved in Thread
90kms from Hubballi, in a town so quiet that most of Karnataka has never had reason to pass through it, stands a temple that took three dynasties and the better part of seven centuries to finish deciding what it wanted to be. The Kadambas began the Tarakeshwara Temple at Hangal in the 5th century; the Hoysalas added to it in the 10th and 11th ; the Kalyani Chalukyas, arriving last, gave it the form that survives today, sometime in the 12th century.
What all three dynasties agreed on, apparently without needing to discuss it, was the material: chloritic schist, a soft grey-green stone that a chisel can coax into detail most rock refuses to hold. It is the same reason Hoysala carvers elsewhere in Karnataka could render a dancer's anklet, her braided hair, the individual beads of her necklace, with a precision that still reads, eight centuries on, as closer to lacework than to stone.
Hangal's carvers used that same softness to build something no chisel should reasonably be able to produce: the Lotus of Hangal, a ceiling carved from a single block of stone into a fully bloomed lotus nine metres across, suspended over an octagonal hall on eight pillars, each one carved with a guardian of the eight directions as prescribed by the Shilpa Shastra, the ancient manual that governs, among other things, exactly how a stone deity should stand.
This is one of the two named sources behind Rahul Mishra's Devi: The Eternal Muse, shown on the opening night of Paris Haute Couture Week's Autumn/Winter presentations on July 6, 2026, alongside the Ajanta Caves and a 12th century sculpture of a dancer that belongs to the same broader tradition, the Hoysala habit of carving celestial dancers, or madanikas, into temple brackets with a fineness that has made them, for a thousand years, the standard against which Indian stone-carving measures its own ambition.
Ajanta contributes something different: not the intricacy of ornament, but the intricacy of scale. The caves are not built; they are subtracted, carved directly into a curve of basalt cliff above the Waghora river, meaning every bodhisattva, every carved pillar, every relief of a musician or a yaksha exists because a sculptor removed everything around it that wasn't the figure, sculpture as an act of elimination rather than addition, patience measured in what was taken away rather than what was put on.
What Mishra's workshop did with this material was to reverse it once more. Where a Hoysala carver spent years subtracting stone until a dancer's bangle emerged from raw schist, Mishra's embroiderers spent comparable hours adding thread until fabric began to look like it had been subtracted from building up zardozi and dabka work in such density that the finished surface reads, to the eye, as chiselled rather than stitched.
Layers of metallic thread were worked until delicate silk carried the weathered, slightly pitted texture of a shrine wall that has stood in monsoon rain for eight centuries; skin-toned bodysuits were used beneath the embroidery so that where fabric ended and body began became genuinely difficult to locate, the way it is difficult, standing in front of a Hoysala bracket figure, to remember that the stone dancer was never alive. The palette Mishra chose stone grey, jet black, stark ivory, beige, antique gold - is not decorative so much as forensic: it is the actual colour range of the sources, the grey-green of chloritic schist, the ivory of aged limestone, the dull gold of temple metalwork left unpolished for centuries. One look placed carved faces on either side of the model's own head, a direct citation of the way Hoysala and Chalukya sculpture frequently multiplies a deity's face to suggest that a god is looking in more directions than a human neck allows.
The jewellery, developed with Tanishq as Mishra's first fine-jewellery line, extended the citation rather than decorating around it, natural diamonds and pieces drawn from temple jewellery traditions were built directly into the structure of the garments, so that ornament stopped being something added to clothing and became, as it is on a temple wall, structural to the object itself. Sumant Kumar, a clay artisan, built ceremonial headpieces modelled on temple crowns; the milliner Stephen Jones supplied the show's more physically improbable sculptural headwear, the kind that has no real precedent in stone but understands, correctly, that a temple tower also defies what its own materials should be able to do.
What is easy to miss, watching a runway, is how much technical stubbornness this required on both ends of the seven-century gap the collection is spanning. A 12th century mason at Hangal had a chisel, a soft stone, and evidently no shortage of patience, and used all three to make rock look like it might, at any moment, exhale.
A 21st century embroiderer had needle, metallic thread, and a comparable reserve of patience, and used them to make silk look like it had already turned back to stone.
Between those two acts of transformation sits a strange kind of fidelity, not to how the sculptures looked, exactly, but to how much difficulty their makers were willing to absorb in order to make hard, permanent material look momentarily alive, and soft, temporary material look momentarily eternal.
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