This year’s collection, “The Divine Androgyne” didn’t start with a sketch, but with a mislabel. In the aftermath of a fire that changed the course of both Gupta’s life and that of his partner, poet Navkirat Sodhi, last year, Gupta returned to the runway with a collection named “Across The Flame”, and straight into the familiar script of roles. Sodhi was called “his wife” by the media. A familiar reflex that says more about our need for tidy definitions than about the people being described.
For 2026, Gupta’s point of departure may have been last year, but the destination was far older. The Divine Androgyne draws from Indian spiritual philosophy, Advaita, to be precise, a school of thought rooted in non-duality. Separation here is an illusion, masculine and feminine, self and other, body and spirit, collapse into one. In couture terms, bodies are neither revealed nor concealed, but reshaped through Gupta’s sculptural language.
The opening look was a black dress with sculpted volumes behind the waist and up, worn by a model whose face we could only see by half, from the front of the waist and up, a glowing silhouette paid homage to The Big Bang. “Time exists only for those too caught up to create,” was a line from the poem that opened the show alongside the dress, but Sodhi was not the only one in the room playing with the concept of time. As the show went on, we saw Gupta’s designs carry watch components as metallic sequins. Web-like thread techniques translating energy into form, living, body-mapped networks connecting twin silhouettes, or flames. Red, white, gold, jasmine, brocade, and sari-inspired weaving turned couture into a cross-cultural bridal statement. This runway had it all. Even Sodhi stepped on it again, in a look that allowed her injuries to show, embodying resilience, healing, and shared ascent.
The Divine Androgyne was more of a manifesto than a collection. Gupta’s sculptural silhouettes, web-like threads, and gravity-defying forms turned bodies into living architecture. And through it all, the creatives themselves stood at the center, proof that creation and identity are never fixed, they flow and rise together.
