From the Met to Coachella to Mumbai, it’s the year of the jasmine

Forget Year of the Fire Horse. It’s the year of the jasmine. At the Met Gala earlier this week, Isha Ambani stepped out in a look that was an homage to India on so many levels. A key element of her ensemble? The string of jasmine she had pinned to her hair. But Ambani’s gajra probably didn’t leave the flower’s famously delicate floral scent in her wake since hers was carefully constructed from paper and metal buds in the studio of Brooklyn-based Sourabh Gupta.

Gupta is an artist known for his true-to-life sculptures of flowers, and he told The Nod that stylist Anaita Shroff Adajania asked him to look at the works of the great Raja Ravi Varma as the starting point for Ambani’s hair ornament. The 18th-century painter frequently painted elegant Nair women weaving garlands of jasmine or pinning them to their hair, a reflection of how across parts of India the jasmine isn’t merely a form of decor or a source of scent; it’s part of the rituals of daily life.

For many Indian designers, the fragile jasmine has become a medium through which they’re able to offer a more personal, nuanced take on fashion’s enduring obsession with flowers. While Dior had his cyclamen and lily of the valley and Oscar de la Renta had his gardenias and chrysanthemums, we have bountiful bouquets of our own to pluck from, and this moment is for the mogra.

That’s exactly what Sanjay Garg, founder of Raw Mango, wanted to showcase at his most recent London Fashion Week show. Garg has always been about finding his own vocabulary, and this season he sent out gowns that had thick wreaths of jasmine wrapped around the torso, blouses made of painstakingly constructed textile blossoms, even a sari-dress hybrid edged with a fat garland of mogra on the pallu. Each of Garg’s flowers was laser-cut from silk and assembled by hand. The flower also appeared as a digital print in rayon in the linings of a few garments, a secret known only to the wearer.

“We are not a culture where we give you a single flower!” the designer told The Nod on the eve of his show. “They will be all over a car or a door, used to mark a death, a birth, a wedding. They’re such an essential part of how we mark an occasion.”

Even the show’s runway was lined with glass bowls filled with jasmine garlands, and when guests entered the space, their scent, one that the designer loves, immediately flooded their senses, an easy way to transport you into the Raw Mango world.

Garg is not alone in his love for the bloom. A few weeks earlier in Paris, Gaurav Gupta had his couture 2026 show, where the Delhi-based designer sent out a series of cream-coloured looks that seemed to be overrun with flowers. Tiny silk satin buds creeped up the hem of a corset gown or looped across the torso of a sari-gown hybrid. Gupta told us that each bud was created by wrapping crystals in fabric, then hand-rolling them in fine green thread to mimic the shape of a dainty jasmine blossom. “These were further embroidered with pearls and crystals and suspended like tassels to echo the movement of a gajra. It was important to me that they didn’t feel static but alive, moving with the body, almost breathing,” he said.

That movement was evident a few months later when Alia Bhatt wore a custom Gaurav Gupta sari whose pallu was threaded with cascading mogra tassels that fluttered in her wake like a “living entity”, a fitting nod to how jasmine is very much an active, tangible part of our culture—distributed at weddings, scenting our homes and our public spaces, skillfully braided by men and women who have spent years mastering that art, and of course exported from regions like Madurai to perfume the global scent industry.

Naturally, the internet quickly caught on to this renewed obsession with jasminum sambac, the scientific name for the more popular variety of jasmine, and more floral looks have emerged.

At Coachella, content creator Seerat Saini sported a teeny-tiny miniskirt and bralette from the label Mirchi by Kim that included a matching dupatta made of cutwork jasmine flowers. The overall effect echoed the floral dupattas (made of real jasmine buds) frequently worn by Indian brides for their haldi ceremonies.

For both Gupta and Garg, the tiny, delicate flower carries much emotional and spiritual weight. For Gupta, it’s a flower that’s embedded with deeply personal memories of his mother, of childhood visits to temples. He says, “Growing up, mogra was always present in small, fleeting ways—in hair, in homes, in moments you don’t realise are significant until later. I wanted to translate that into something enduring.” For him, the scent of jasmine is associated with “stillness and devotion”.

For Garg, the flower is a potent reminder of our roots: “What is beautiful is that it’s a very small flower. And the smaller it is, the more fragrant it is. I find that fascinating—such a small element that can change how a room feels. It reminds me that sometimes the smallest things can be the most powerful.”