Sabyasachi Prepares to Mark 25 Years
“Crafts don’t have a geography,” Sabyasachi Mukherjee told me not long ago over lunch in New Delhi. His face settled into an enigmatic smile as he considered an assertion that, like so much else about this charming and paradoxical designer, was a contradiction in terms.
Crafts, of course, are nothing if not geographically specific. In a certain sense, they can even be seen as concrete manifestations of culture and the myriad ways people fashion the raw materials that surround them into objects of both function and art.
Few comprehend this better than the founder of a label that is increasingly a name to be reckoned with in the sphere of global luxury goods, a darling of socialites and oligarchs with aspirations to be India’s answer to Ralph Lauren. For 25 years Mukherjee has promulgated the survival and evolution of traditional regional crafts that have struggled to combat the onslaught of industrialization.
Along the way he established a burgeoning empire that extends the reach of his crafts-based designs far beyond his native Calcutta. On Christopher Street in New York, an immense Sabyasachi boutique expands both his franchise and his singularly maximalist vision to a market only beginning to learn his name.
Back home he is a design superstar, one who is inaugurating his quarter-century celebrations with a runway show on January 25 in central Mumbai, where in 2023 he opened a flagship spread across three floors and 25,000 square feet of commercial real estate in what was once the British Bank of the Middle East.
It is there that Mukherjee has unleashed the full, dizzying range of an aesthetic he characterizes, without hyperbole, with a coinage of his own: Bengal Byzantine. The description fits. With its 100 Belgian crystal chandeliers, 275 layered carpets, 3,000 books, and ranks of Chinese urns the size of ponies, the Sabyasachi flagship is at once the apotheosis of Orientalist kitsch and a vision so totalizing it exerts a magnetic force that is the retail version of another famous fantasyland, the one invented by Walt Disney.
“My office tells me to stop saying this, but I am very uncomfortable calling myself a designer,” Mukherjee says.
Yet it is not pure design that draws in billionaire clients and also the more aspirational members of India’s booming middle class. Even shoppers unable to acquire multimillion-dollar pieces from his high jewelry collection (ornate adornments featuring gumball-size diamonds and emeralds as big as playing cards) can still walk away with a handbag or belt ornamented with one of his trademark pieces of hardware: a gold-plated tiger. There was even a lipstick collection with Estée Lauder.
Though hesitant to say so outright, Mukherjee has embarked on a world-building campaign, a mission fueled in part by a substantial 2021 investment in his label by Aditya Birla, a Rajput billionaire whose family conglomerate, best known for manufacturing unglamorous commodities like steel and cement, has moved into retail fashion. If India for eons formed a crucial element of the global trade in luxury goods, exporting everything from spices to silks to the rarest of gems, it has seldom done so with a designer’s name attached to them. “I think the time has come,” Mukherjee says, “for that perception to change.”
This story appears in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of Town & Country, with the headline "Escape to Where the Tourmalines Speak Louder." SUBSCRIBE NOW
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