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.
Akanksha Kamath chats with artist Rithika Merchant about how her artworks thread together stories from home.
