Paris was deep in a heat wave. Hand fans had become the new accessory no one left the house without, and along the Canal Saint-Martin, people were even jumping into the more than questionable water for a needed relief. The Musée Guimet offered a more dignified escape: stone floors, low light, the cool authority of a building that has been holding things for a very long time. It also turned out to be the exact right place for what Charlotte Chowdhury was about to show.

Chowdhury is French and Indian, trained at Central Saint Martins, and spent four years at Jacquemus before founding RESCHA in 2022, when she decided she had her own story to tell. The label’s name comes from “resha,” the Hindi word for yarn, with a “C” added for Charlotte. A small detail, but it signals how the brand works: everything traces back to a personal double origin.

Anveshan, the SS27 collection, means something like “search” or “exploration.” It continues a narrative Chowdhury began last season, this time turning toward Krishna Riboud, the Indian historian and textile specialist who devoted her life to collecting and preserving Indian textile arts. When Riboud died in 2000, she left behind a collection of more than 3,800 pieces, now housed at the very museum where Chowdhury chose to show.

The palette comes directly from Mughal objects in the Guimet’s holdings: an emerald engraved with floral motifs, a jade cup in pale ivory and yellow, miniature paintings of imperial garden scenes. Chowdhury rendered these in a palette of beige, stone grey, white, and warm brown, then broke it open with bursts of pink, orange, and yellow. The whole palette arrives not as decoration but as information, like someone had held silk up to a Mughal miniature and let the color seep through.

The embroidery work is where the collection becomes most explicit about its source. A silver filigree tray from the Guimet’s collection became long metallic embroideries running the length of garments, as if someone had pressed a pencil to the object’s edge and followed it slowly across silk. Bidri metalwork, inlaid with silver, returned as floral forms in thread. The textiles moved between wild silk, silk crêpe, chiffon, satin, and hand-painted cotton. Watching a silk piece catch the museum’s interior light while the very artifacts it referenced sat nearby in their cases was like turning a page and finding the illustration you had been looking for.

The jewelry line completes the argument. Chowdhury drew from Mughal ornaments: a gold bird pendant with rubies, pearls, and rock crystal; delicately beaded nose pieces; hair jewels in metal. None of it reads as costume. Metal is the central material, reaching back toward daggers and steel objects that run through the Indian aesthetic archive. These pieces feel less like accessories and more like objects that have already lived several lives before arriving here.

Inside the Guimet that afternoon, Anveshan had everything it needed to make its case without needing to raise its voice. What Riboud spent a lifetime gathering, Chowdhury is finding ways to let live again.