After Seventeen Years, Sabyasachi Returns To New York Fashion Week For Spring Summer '27

Seventeen years ago, when Sabyasachi Mukherjee showed a runway collection in New York, legendary fashion critic Suzy Menkes advised him, "Don't woo the West. Become big in India, and the West will come on your terms." Seventeen years on, a steady climb into becoming synonymous with Indian couture, Met Gala appearances and a jewellery collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum later, Sabyasachi is back to take on New York Fashion Week.

His Spring Summer’27 collection, building on his collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an extended take on the crossroads between Bengal and the Byzantine Empire, aptly named Bengal Byzantine Broadway. Christy Turlington opened the show dressed head to toe in Japan denim, complete with jewellery from the designer’s recently announced collaboration.

If you remove the Sabyasachi-isms, this is as American as a collection gets. Classic Americana elements like cowboy hats, bandanas, plaid shirts and denim vests ran aplenty, styled on top of 70’s bohemian patterns (the cummerbund never goes away). Western American imagery and gingham prints peeked from below layers of jackets. All of which was contrasted with suede. Lots and lots of it.

Taking these influences, Mukherjee did what he does best. His blinding jewellery pieces featured in almost every look, almost like talismans hanging from the neck. A long coat featured stone-encrusted collars. So were the bags. The Sabyasachi tiger became a brooch, but found its place below the collar button of a denim shirt instead of on the lapel of a jacket.

The metal-tipped ankle boots could be their own collection, all with their different colours, patterns and embellishments. Evening jackets featured intricate floral patterns. Even the simpler overcoats had their plackets lined with golden floral embroidery. Sabyasachi has said before how he saw Byzantine as the intersection between the West and the East. True to this idea, some of the pieces were embroidered with traditional East Asian art styles. One of the suede jackets carried motifs of red-crowned cranes, the kind you see in traditional East Asian paintings.

Mukherjee’s thesis with the collection is that civilisations that are remembered centuries after their glory days are not inherited whole; they are composed in recollection, borrowed piece by piece from whoever happens to pass through. Byzantium absorbed Greek philosophy, Roman law and Persian ornamentation into something that belonged to no single origin. Calcutta did the same with British wallpaper and Corinthian columns, Chinese gardens, and Bengal's traditions of craftsmanship, literature, music, theatre, and food into a mixed bag that gave it its unique flavour.

Viewed through this lens, New York, being the city of arrivals that gets its identity from the various communities that come to make a new life here, is only a natural part of the Bengal Byzantine Broadway trifecta.

In his show note, Mukherjee said, “Cities become great when they gather the world." In the seventeen years since his last New York show, Sabyasachi gathered the world, its influences and its audiences into Mumbai ballrooms, on Met Gala steps, and inside a growing string of flagship stores from Kolkata to Dubai.

On a Tuesday afternoon in September, in the hour before Thom Browne closed out New York Fashion Week, he brought it all together in New York City, almost like a tribute to NYC and the grand journey it set him on.