NEW YORK, U.S.: A great city is like a great love — it brings you closer to your own center, envelops you in its immutable magic, and no matter how far you stray, it always calls you back. For Aisha Rao, that magic pulses strongest in the streets of New York — a city that carved its spirit onto her creative journey during her time at Parsons.
New York is where she first learned the grammar of garment-making: how to drape on a mannequin, how to draft a pattern, how to tell a story through fabric and form. But long before the classrooms and critiques, it was the city itself that left an imprint. New York felt familiar from the start — a place where difference is the norm, where languages and traditions mingle freely, much like in India. It didn’t just welcome her; it mirrored her.
Rao’s latest collection returns to this emotional and artistic origin point. Less a homage than a continuation, it draws on the city’s natural rhythm of contrast and coexistence — neoclassical alongside postmodern, Art Deco gleaming next to glass-and-steel. It’s this dance of opposites that resonates with Rao’s own design language, which has always been rooted in the tension between the ornate and the architectural, the maximal and the minimal, the past and the now.
In this collection, that language is fluently. The silhouettes move like the city: structured yet fluid, bold yet considered. Elements of mid-century romanticism blend seamlessly with Indian crafts, while high-octane glamour softens alongside time-tested silhouettes. But beyond visual cues, it’s the spirit of contradiction — so intrinsic to both New York and Rao’s creative vision — that binds the work.
Much like Rao’s earlier campaigns shot in Turkey and Siddhpur, where layered cultural histories shaped the mood and mise en scène, this collection finds its anchor in place. And not just any place — one that contains multitudes. A red lehenga doesn’t clash with the backdrop of Central Park or a Midtown skyline. Instead, it belongs. As does a draped silhouette in the Beekman Hotel’s shadowy corridors. Here, nothing is ever out of context.
It isn’t bridalwear bound to ritual. It’s an ode to movement, memory, and the radical act of blending — of belonging everywhere, all at once. A city stitched into a garment, a garment stitched into a story.
