HEADING SOUTH

How Gaurav Gupta, Manish Malhotra and Prabal Gurung turned the Met Gala into a showcase for South Asian design, heritage and power.

- Words: ANANDHI GOPINATH

By the time you read this, the sequins will have settled and the Met steps will be back to being a tourist thoroughfare.

That distance is useful. It lets us see this year’s Costume Art gala not just as a flurry of posts and trains, but as a quiet shift in who gets to sign the work. For once, some of the most resonant stories on fashion’s most photographed staircase came from the Global South not as anonymous inspiration, but as authorship: South Asian designers putting their own names, histories and techniques on the record, even as Western houses continued to shop the same visual vocabulary with far less attribution.