Isha Ambani’s jasmine gajra at the Met was made of 600 paper flowers

If you clocked that seemingly endless trail of jasmine, or mogra flowers, that was pinned in Isha Ambani’s hair for the Met Gala, here’s some news for you. The hair ornament was a sculpture created by Brooklyn-based artist Sourabh Gupta specially for Ambani’s look. “I’ve not slept more than three hours each night since we started working on it last Sunday,” reveals Gupta over a call from his studio, where the team was busy finishing up and photographing his artful take on the traditional gajra paranda.

The piece in question was crafted using paper, copper, and brass, each petal and stigma carefully crafted and painted by hand by a small team of people in Gupta’s expansive 5,000 sq ft design studio in Brooklyn. In total there are around 600 flowers, although over a 1,000 were created to begin with. “It’s like, you know, you go to a garden and are making perfume. You would pluck, like, thousands of flowers to finally get the most beautiful ones,” says the soft-spoken 35-year-old, who moved to New York in 2018 after studying architecture in India.

The collaboration was the brainchild of stylist Anaita Shroff Adajania, who approached Gupta with a brief that included references to Raja Ravi Varma paintings housed in the Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum in Vadodara and the idea of the traditional floral gajra. To those classical images, Gupta added memories of growing up in Hiranagar, Jammu and Kashmir, where his father would bring jasmine flowers to the family puja room each morning.

“Of course we wanted to do something that was a little deconstructed. We proposed about a hundred different approaches and in the end came up with something that was a gajra in the traditional sense but with some metallic elements to make it more modern,” says Gupta.

The artist, who works with materials like ceramics and metal along with paper, isn’t new to the rodeo that is the Met Gala. He’s previously worked on looks for the designer Tory Burch, who wore an organza gown decorated with hundreds of paper daisies in 2019, and heiress Ivy Getty, whom he wrapped in a creeper of ivy in 2022. But most of Gupta’s work is not to be worn. His standalone sculptures are usually for private clients and he’s currently preparing for a large exhibition of his studio’s works to be held later in the year.

What draws Gupta to creating his beautiful lifelike creations? He says, “In nature, a flower blooms for a day and then it’s gone. There’s a particular romantic moment that I want to capture, freezing that time when the light falls on it perfectly or when it moves a certain way. Like in a photograph, or the Pahadi-style paintings I would see as a child.”