There’s something oddly familiar about the opulence of Bridgerton—its pearl-laced corsets, the lilac light of dusk on Regency balconies, its curated fantasy of love, longing, and empire. It doesn’t mirror reality so much as it stylises it, offering the past as a dreamy theatre of wealth and desire. It works because it’s beautiful. It also works because it knows it’s fiction.
But when Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s designs entered this dream, something shifted. The fantasy didn’t just continue—it deepened, darkened, and grew roots.
Sabyasachi doesn’t design clothes in the Western sense. He doesn’t chase trends. What he does is memory work. Every stitch feels like it belongs to a larger story—of India before borders, of women who wore heirlooms before they were called that, of quiet resistance through beauty. When his pieces entered the Bridgerton universe, it was more than just a fashion crossover. It was a collision of histories: the coloniser’s romance reimagined through the lens of the colonised, and yet it wasn’t bitter. It was hauntingly graceful.
The power lies in the quiet.
Western fashion has long consumed the aesthetics of the East without absorbing its weight. The silk, the gold, the pattern—lifted from context and turned into novelty. The East became something to be admired, then dismissed. An accessory to European narratives.
But Sabyasachi doesn’t allow that. His work enters the room on its own terms. It doesn’t ask to be interpreted. It isn’t designed to make you comfortable. It’s regal without apology, nostalgic without being naive. In Bridgerton, this meant seeing Indian jewellery and fabric wrapped around characters who might have, in another world, ruled over lands where these designs were born. There’s irony there, yes—but also a kind of justice. An invitation to imagine a different balance of power, not through confrontation, but through beauty. The embroidery speaks. The pearls remember. The silhouettes breathe differently.
It’s not a costume. It’s a reclamation.
What makes this collaboration matter is not just its aesthetic success, though that’s undeniable. It’s the quiet statement behind it: that Indian craftsmanship doesn’t need to be adapted to fit a Western frame. It is the frame. It doesn’t need approval—it’s centuries older than most of what surrounds it.
To some, this might look like a soft kind of empire—an “orientalist couture”, where luxury and legacy get intertwined. But that’s too flat a reading. What Sabyasachi offers is not a replica of empire but a reminder of survival. His work carries grief and pride in equal measure. The gold isn’t just gold. It’s memory. The velvet isn’t just luxury. It’s language.
And so, when his pieces showed up on Bridgerton, they didn’t blend in—they lingered. They reminded the viewer, gently but clearly, that there’s more than one kind of royalty.
And perhaps, in this imagined history, that’s the most radical thing of all.
