Ananya Panday’s trompe-l’oeil column dress from Rahul Mishra was entirely hand-embroidered with threads
Ananya Panday is a fashion sensation, and does not seem to be slowing down, when it comes to amassing international popularity. The actor, already Chanel’s first-ever global ambassador, was appointed by Piaget, a Switzerland-based luxury watch-making brand, as a friend of the maison sometime in June this year. Recently, for an appearance at the brand’s event held in Mumbai, Panday wore a floor-grazing column dress with a plunging neckline from designer Rahul Mishra and a Piaget watch.
The body-hugging dress with a structured plunging neckline, first showcased in Paris in the designer’s Fall 2026 haute couture collection Devi, is the embodiment of optical illusion. The dress, designed to look like stone carving, is a trompe-l’oeil—a French artistic technique used to create the illusion of a three-dimensional design on a flat surface—and uses only thread embroidery to create that effect. With French knots made with threads in different colours filling up the entirety of the dress’s visible surface, and fine resham, with simple continuous stitching, is used to create raised surfaces for the pronounced chiaroscuro effect.
