5,600 hours, 1,800 carats, a Subodh Gupta mask: India’s Met Gala 2026 feat. Karan Johar, Isha Ambani, Ananya Birla

Met Gala 2026: India did not just show up at the Met Gala 2026; it arrived with intention. Three of the night’s most talked-about looks came from Indian attendees, each rooted in a distinct tradition of craft, art and heritage, and each making a case for Indian creativity on fashion’s biggest stage.

Karan Johar: 5,600 hours, one jacket lining nobody will ever see

Karan Johar made history as the first Indian film director to attend the Met Gala, and he did not arrive quietly. His look, designed by Manish Malhotra and styled by Eka Lakhani, drew its inspiration from painter Raja Ravi Varma, whose 19th-century portraits gave India some of its most enduring visual iconography.

The ensemble took a team of artisans 86 days and 5,600 hours to complete, according to Vogue. Every motif was painted entirely by hand. The embroidery was treated with acrylic and oil finishes and varnished so the textile holds the same luminosity as an actual painting. The borders were built on rubberised bases layered with zardozi, giving them a sculptural, raised quality, like paint thickly applied to canvas. Pillars, lotuses and swans emerge in three dimensions. Even the lining of the jacket was hand-painted, invisible to most, but present nonetheless.

“Raja Ravi Varma gave India its most enduring images of itself,” Johar told Vogue. “The artisans who built this ensemble gave those images new life. And I get to wear that. That feels very much like me, the person who has always believed that how you tell a story matters as much as the story itself.”

Isha Ambani: 1,800 carats, a mango sculpture and a Nizam’s sarpech

Isha Ambani made perhaps the most layered statement of the evening. Her custom look by Gaurav Gupta featured a hand-painted Pichwai-inspired saree woven with threads of pure gold by artisans from Swadesh, Reliance Retail’s artisan-only brand, paired with Gupta’s signature sculptural cape.

The blouse, embedded with real diamonds, carried a piece of history on its back: a sarpech once part of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s jewellery collection. “The blouse is full of my mother’s jewellery pieces,” Ambani told Vogue on the red carpet.

The scale of the jewellery was extraordinary. “Over 1800 carats of diamonds, alongside emeralds, polki and kundan, are embedded into the garment (the blouse), transforming it into a living surface of inheritance and form,” designer Gaurav Gupta wrote on Instagram.

Ambani also carried a mango sculpture by Indian contemporary artist Subodh Gupta in a crochet bag, a nod to Indian heritage and a literal embodiment of this year’s ‘Fashion is Art’ theme. Her hair featured a gajra-inspired sculpture, an artistic reinterpretation of the traditional mogra gajra, handcrafted using paper, copper and brass by Brooklyn-based artist Sourabh Gupta.

The evening was not Ambani’s first India-forward statement of the week. At a pre-Met Gala bash in New York on May 1, she wore a bandage dress made using 26 different kinds of borders, each representing a distinct region and craft of India.

Ananya Birla: Robert Wun couture and a Subodh Gupta facepiece

Ananya Birla made her Met Gala debut in a couture look by Robert Wun, paired with a metallic facepiece created by Indian artist Subodh Gupta, a striking combination that merged sharp Western tailoring with Indian contemporary art.

The look featured a structured black blazer with a cinched waist and sculptural peplum, flowing into a voluminous floor-length pleated skirt. A statement diamond choker completed the ensemble, while hair and makeup were kept deliberately minimal to let the structural silhouette carry the moment.

Styled by Rhea Kapoor, Birla’s look was anchored by Gupta’s facepiece, a work in his signature stainless steel that Kapoor described as functioning both as a mask concealing the wearer’s identity and as a symbol of powerful, striking strength.

Taken together, the three looks represented something more than individual fashion choices. They were a coordinated, if unplanned, articulation of what Indian craft, art and heritage look like when given the world’s biggest stage, and the answer, on the night of May 5, 2026, was considerable.