At Hyundai India Couture Week 2026, designer Arpita Mehta presented her debut couture collection and reintroduced Indian ceremonial dressing as something you live in, not something you admire from a distance.
Arpita Mehta is known for her play with colour, mirror work and contemporary silhouettes. On Monday evening at Hyundai India Couture Week, she took all of that and gave a new language to the ever-evolving landscape of ceremonial dressing. The collection was called Ceremonial, and it was, fittingly, her most personal work yet.
The premise was simple but not small: heritage textiles aren’t relics. They’re living crafts that keep changing shape with the women who wear them. So Ceremonial pulled from Bandhani, Banarasi and tissue — fabrics Mehta has worked with for years — and, for the first time in her couture vocabulary, brought in Kantha. The idea was to let each textile stay exactly as authentic as it’s always been, just filtered through her own design language.
The headgear, the mirrors, and why it all had to feel like jewellery
If one thing stopped people mid-scroll from this show, it was the headgear – dripping mirror and pearls, resembling something like a chainmail headgear.
Mehta says the idea came from wanting the collection to have “that little extra edge” — something that elevates a bridal look the way a serious piece of jewellery would. “I wanted to re-mirror,” she explains. “That’s why you see all the headgears had mirrors and pearls. It is almost like an extension of the outfit when they are getting married. We wanted it to be like a jewellery piece that ties in everything,” she tells India Today.
That instinct, treating the headgear as jewellery rather than as a runway prop, runs through the whole show’s logic. Nothing was designed to be looked at once and never touched again.
Not just for the bride
The word “ceremonial” is doing a lot of work in the collection’s title, and Mehta was clear that it wasn’t meant to describe one woman in one red lehenga. It was built for everyone standing next to her.
“It’s for the brides, the bridesmaids, it’s for the bridal gang,” she says. “It’s for everyone who is connected to the bride — the sister, best friend or niece, whoever it is.” The goal, as she puts it, was to move past the idea of a single, predictable bridal red and instead offer “a mix of everything that people wear” across a wedding — which is really the whole point of Ceremonial: sculpted lehengas, fluid sarees, corseted blouses and contemporary drapes that could believably show up at a sangeet, a reception, or a Sunday ceremony that doesn’t have a name yet.
Corsetry ran quietly through the structure of it all — not as a statement piece, but as the thing holding the softness together, giving the drapes and lehengas a shape that could move without losing form. The fact that corsets have been a prominent feature in most of the ICW collection this season is proof that we are not done with the structured element of clothing yet.
The palette followed its own kind of ceremony: coconut, rose tan, sage and seafoam opening the show, deepening slowly into violet and sindoor red by the end — restraint giving way to intensity, the way an actual wedding week tends to.
A runway with the best 70s-80s music
Mehta didn’t stage this as a conventional show. Working with creative show director Pranav Goswamy, the set was built as a members-only lounge out of the 1970s and ’80s — Indo-European furniture, brass accents, suede, velvet, fringe lamps, and rugs from Jaipur Rugs which borrowed the warmth of old Turkish and Persian interiors.
The soundtrack matched the mood, contemporary house music laced with nods to ’70s and ’80s Bollywood.
Two shows, one house, zero rivalry
Ninety minutes after Mehta’s show ended, her husband, Kunal Rawal, presented his own collection at the same venue, one evening, two designers, two very different design languages. It’s the kind of set-up that invites a competition narrative, but Mehta shuts that down gently.
“No, I would say it’s more like supporting one another,” she says. “I wouldn’t call it competing, but we love upping our presentation — if you know someone’s doing it, okay, let’s make it better. Of course it’s healthy. Everything is healthy,” adds.
Delhi versus Mumbai, according to the woman who dresses both
With stores across the country — Delhi and Mumbai chief among them — Mehta has a front-row view of how differently the two cities actually get dressed. Asked to break it down, she says: “Bombay is a little more relaxed and chill, while Delhi is a little more formal and elevated — and both are brilliant.”
Coming back to Arpita Mehta’s ICW debut collection, she says, “The collection came from a desire to celebrate Indian textile heritage as something living and evolving, rather than something preserved in time. Every craft, every silhouette and every detail was designed to reflect the way women celebrate today — rooted in tradition but deeply personal in expression.”
And that purpose was perhaps served.