Gaurav Gupta grew up in New Delhi in a family that ran an iron and steel business. He graduated from the National Institute of Fashion Technology in 2000 and from Central Saint Martins in 2003, after which he worked in Hussein Chalayan's London studio before launching his eponymous label in 2005 with his brother Saurabh as co-director. The label he built from a five-storey atelier outside Delhi, with over 300 artisans, has since dressed Beyoncé on the Renaissance World Tour, put Cardi B in a cobalt-blue sculptural gown at the 2023 Grammys that became one of the most talked-about looks of the evening, and in 2023, made him the third Indian designer to showcase at Paris Haute Couture Week. The Runway music video for The Devil Wears Prada 2, released this week, is his largest single moment yet.
Directed by Parris Goebel, the Runway video opens with Gaga and Doechii stitched into a single oversized red blazer before moving into avant-garde territory, with elaborate costume changes and 18th-century-inspired gowns. The Gaurav Gupta moment arrives mid-video, and it stops the film entirely.
Lady Gaga wore a pearl-toned corseted bodysuit densely hand-embellished with crystals and pearls. Doechii wore a black version layered with spikes and metallic studs, with a base of sequins and crystals beneath the structured detailing. Both pieces were designed as seamless, head-to-toe silhouettes with integrated face coverings, functioning as what the label describes as a second skin. Each look took over 800 hours of craftsmanship and features more than 3,000 crystals, produced by a team of more than 20 artisans.
The construction is consistent with what Gupta has called his future primitive aesthetic, a design language built around boning, sculptural volume, and indigenous Indian embellishment techniques. His pieces are stocked at Neiman Marcus, Harrods, and Moda Operandi, and his Paris Couture debut gave him, in his own words, the prestige, the visibility, the infrastructure to be seen as truly global. The Runway video is what that infrastructure looks like when it delivers.