From subway to runway

New York University student Bhavitha Mandava, the first Indian woman to open a Chanel show, has been dubbed an internet muse

- Alisha Haridasani Gupta

As far as origin stories go, Bhavitha Mandava’s seems plucked out of fiction.

In the summer of 2024, she was doing what most college students do: studying late at the library, working a campus job and applying for internships.

Within a year, Mandava, 25, was catapulted from that college life to the tippity-top of the fashion world, walking runways in Milan, Paris and, in December, for an unconventional Chanel Metiers d’Arts show staged inside an abandoned subway station in New York.

The show opened not on a runway, but with Mandava nonchalantly walking down subway stairs. Clips of her strutting onto the platform, her hand in her jeans pocket, have become internet catnip and inadvertently turned her into a face of the luxury house.

“Yesterday, I went to my laundromat and I got recognised,” she said. “People were like, ‘Can we take a selfie?’ It’s crazy. When something like this happens, it’s so easy to lose yourself. It can change the way you perceive life.”

Her Cinderella-esque trajectory is also a story of the ever-changing world of fashion, immigration in the United States and pure chance.

And it all began, as it turns out, on a subway platform.