When Bhavitha Mandava made her debut at the 2026 Met Gala, brows furrowed. While other guests arrived in moulded breastplates, intricate facial prosthetics and vast, shipwreck-topped organza capes requiring a team of handlers, the 26-year-old NYU graduate turned up in what appeared to be a three-quarter zip and jeans. “She couldn’t find anything fancy to wear,” wrote one person online of the Chanel look. “Jeans??” asked another.

This was, of course, nonsense. Mandava’s outfit was custom-made from silk organza – a fabric whose lightness demands an extraordinary degree of savoir-faire to handle – and was thick with personal significance. It nodded not only to her history-making appearance in Chanel’s 2026 Métiers d’Art show, when she became the first Indian model ever to open for the house, but to the circumstances in which she was discovered. Staged in a disused subway station, the show served as a quasi-re-enactment of her scouting at Atlantic Terminal station in 2024, with Mandava wearing what artistic director Matthieu Blazy described as a high-fashion take on the quarter-zip jumper and jeans she had been wearing.

Anyway, there was no accusing Mandava of underplaying things when she made her red-carpet debut – the Met Gala’s carpet was technically cream – at this year’s Venice Film Festival, for which she wore the closing look from Chanel’s Resort 2027 collection at the premiere of Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People?. The aptly named “mermaid dress” is (deep breath) embroidered with 30,000 domed, heart-shaped sequins in graduated shades of iridescent sky blue and deep turquoise – creating the illusion of a siren’s glimmering skin emerging from the water – while its flounces are embellished with a further 96,000 oval sequins in the same aqueous shades. In total, the maison’s Lesage atelier spent 1,250 hours embroidering the gown, which Mandava then finished with a camellia brooch in blue and green sequins and earrings in gold-tone metal and red resin.

Chanel Resort 2027.

GoRunway.com

It marked another chapter in the British cover star’s extraordinary rise, one approached with a thoughtfulness beyond her years. “I’ve been trying to remind myself to actually be there when I’m there, not to be in my head about it,” she told this magazine’s fashion features director Alice Newbold ahead of the Met Gala. “There isn’t a word for it yet. I think some feelings only take shape after they’ve happened, once you’ve had time to sit with them.” Mandava understands, too, that being seen in a dress like this means something beyond glamour and fame and career. “I think about brown girls who might see it and feel, even in a small way, that something has shifted in what they believe is possible for them. I know that feeling, because I’ve been that girl too, even if I didn’t fully recognise it at the time,” she said of such milestones back in May. “I just want to show up as myself, honestly and fully, and if that can mean something to someone else, then that feels like enough.”