After a successful collab with Dior, Rithika Merchant is ready for a break

On Monday, the internet erupted when Mumbai-based painter Rithika Merchant’s surrealist, other-worldly drawings became the scenography for Dior’s Paris Haute Couture Week Spring/Summer 2025 show. Her creatures—ungendered, half-animal, half-human, with a bird-like countenance (Ibis for wisdom, and crows and kites because they swing past her windows in Mumbai all the time) decked the surrounding walls of the catwalk at Dior’s couture show. As proxies for humans, they are seen enjoying head massages under hibiscus blooms (a story that Merchant borrows from her mother’s childhood growing up in Kerala), they comb their hair with tender self-care, and in other places, embody her personal wishes and manifestation for women and the world.

“I am very proud of my Malayali heritage,” says Merchant. “Malayali women are extremely fierce, and it's a matriarchal society. These stories are borrowed from my ancestral oral histories that I think also resonate with the ethos of what Maria Grazia [Chiuri, creative director at Dior] does with the house that is so much about female empowerment,” she says, as we sit down at the Musée Rodin where her artworks engulf us from all sides, hours after the show took place.

Her artworks thread together stories from home—one about Revati Amma, Merchant’s great grandmother on her maternal side in Kerala, who started a milk cooperative, is a study in financial independence and integrity. “It’s my favourite story…” she says. “Revati Amma wanted the women around her to be in charge of their own money. She started the cooperative as a way for money to go directly to the women who joined her in business.” Merchant’s mother, who was at the show to celebrate her daughter's work, instilled similar values in Merchant. “I was raised a feminist. Mum always told me to be extremely self-reliant. Which I am. And she taught me to be that way. And I think those stories need to be told.” Merchant joins an army of women—Faith Ringgold, Eva Jospin, Madhvi Parekh—spotlit by Chiuri in her past couture collections.

Merchant moved back to Mumbai in 2022 after spending a large part of her life in Barcelona. The timing could not have been more serendipitous. It was in Mumbai during the 2023 Dior show that Merchant met Chiuri, thanks to an introduction by Karishma Swali, creative director of Chanakya Ateliers and Chanakya School of Craft. “I took my book to Maria Grazia, and she loved the embroidery hoops that I tend to use while painting. She kept stopping on the pages where there were pieces with embroidery hoops and she wanted to incorporate them somehow into the final project,” remembers Merchant.

It was during Merchant’s first visit to Chanakya in the early stages of the project that she knew the collaboration was a definite yes. “It’s just incredible what they do,” she says. The hoops are her way of paying homage to the hands that have played a role in bringing her paintings to the towering tapestries. “Sure, I am the painter, I made all this stuff, but this would not have happened without all of them at Chanakya. Being able to incorporate the hoops in the final pieces felt very full circle. It’s a nod to the actual hand of the artisan.”

After seven months of painting, ‘The Flowers We Grew’ was ready to go into the skilled hands of the Chanakya artisans. Two months later, everything down to the colour matching of the thread had been impeccably transferred from paper to panel. Now housed in the Musée Rodin from January 28-February 2, Merchant’s artworks are available to view in person for the public. Come February 2, all the artworks will be rolled up and go back into the LVMH archives, where all the works of previously commissioned artists are housed. Merchant, meanwhile, will go back to her studio in Mumbai and “decompress” from all the events that have unfolded in the past few days.

“To be honest, I kind of miss being in the studio,” she quips. “Two weeks and I get itchy and I need to go back into the studio. I miss painting, it's very relaxing.” What’s next I ask? Well, what comes after we’ve terraformed another world, she responds. “Next, it’s about building and coming to harmony with the natural world. So I’m looking at a lot of structures that we see in our world—things like the gills of mushrooms or ant hills. Natural architecture in our world and how that would be translated if we were to ever move on to another planet.”