Indian couturier Sabyasachi opens his biggest flagship yet, and explains what building a high jewellery collection with The Met actually took

Josh Romm, who leads global licensing and partnerships at The Met joined our conversation, describing the fit differently but arrived at the same place: “There’s a real organic fit between the mission of the licensing programme—to reach new audiences, to educate people around the world about art—and what Sabyasachi does. We have 19 curatorial departments in total, over two million artworks spanning 5,000 years. This will live on.” Each department Sabyasachi approached, he added, embraced him individually and collectively, “because the story he tells is a true one about it being a period of convergence.”

Convergence is, in fact, the whole design brief. The Met’s rule was strict: take inspiration, never replicate. “Almost nothing we used was a piece of jewellery to begin with,” Sabyasachi said. “It was a sculpture, a pillar, a coin, a funerary case, and we converted them into jewellery.” To hold both the antique and the contemporary at once, he fused 18 karat gold with 22 karat gold in a single piece—18 karat for what he calls the “industrial, modern, edgy” structural elements, 22 karat sculpted to carry what he described as “old world wisdom.” It was, by his own account, a technical nightmare. “The first four pieces we did fell apart. We didn’t tell anybody. It just wasn’t working out till we cracked the mechanism.” Even the colour of the gold had to be rebuilt from the ground up: alloys sent from Italy were rejected and remade specifically for the collaboration.

The stones took just as long to source. He asked a 150‑year‑old cutting workshop in Jaipur to dig out machines nobody used anymore, and showed the owner photographs of coal‑mine‑cut diamonds and hand‑cut rubies. “He said they’d have to rewire the DNA of the factory to make it happen.” Then came the harder task: finding gems nobody wanted. “Inclusion is considered backward now, because everyone wants stones so polished they look synthetic. But if you look at Mughal emeralds and spinels, they have clouds and inclusions that give them a sense of melancholy. So I’d go to stone vendors and say, show me things nobody wants.”

Behind all of it sits a philosophy about who gets paid, and how. “Craftsmen are not transactional people,” he said. “They take pride in upholding the legacy their forefathers started. The best way to pay a craftsman is to give him the opportunity to excel—housing loans, medical insurance, life insurance, an ecosystem.” It’s a line that connects directly back to the store walkthrough, and to his repeated worry that Indian craft could vanish in a single generation if patronage disappears: “If craft skips a generation, it never comes back.”

What surprised him most, tracing the Byzantine Empire’s stone‑setting and mosaic work back to Bengal, was how familiar it all felt. Before arriving at his own designs, he traced the vocabulary back to its roots—Navratna, the setting of nine astrological gemstones in a single piece, built on Jadau work, one of India’s most primitive forms of gem setting, alongside tiger‑claw settings, hand‑cut bezels and hammered bezels. “There’s so much similarity between Bengali jewellery and Sicilian jewellery. There’s a lot of use of pearls and filigree in both.” Before industrialisation, he argued, it was technique rather than geography or wealth that shaped a piece. “Things were made differently completely on the basis of your financial capability now. But there was a time when it was a level playing field, because it was made by human hands, and because it was all made by human hands, the form might look different but the technique was the same [across regions].” He layered Georgian and Victorian influences carried into Bengal through the British, Jarao techniques from Rajasthan and South Indian temple jewellery motifs, over a Byzantine base—including, in one piece, a Royal Bengal tiger set on a 17th‑century Islamic coin. “Everything was global,” he said, “but it was manufactured from a very Calcutta point of view.”

He is unusually clear‑eyed, for a designer of his stature, about what he wants said of him in fifty years. “I don’t have personal hubris when it comes to creation. I’m not a designer—I’m a ferryman between the past and the present. I don’t want to be remembered for creating something new. I want to be remembered as someone who contributed to continuity.” It is why, he said, he chose Byzantium over an India‑first debut. “Byzantine was a true epicentre of global exchange. India and its subset flowed there—everywhere in the world flowed there.”

Read more: Inside Le Joaillier Révolutionnaire in Paris, Pomellato stakes its claim as jewellery’s great disruptor

He was, by his own admission, more nervous meeting The Met’s curators than any journalist or client he’s faced in twenty‑five years. “I’ve had [an] impostor complex all my life,” he says. All sorts of thoughts came up to him in the lead up to the introduction to The Met team, “I should have gone to university, I should have studied history. But they were so nice to me”. What he took from watching them work—hand‑restoring objects under microscopes, over months, gloved and unhurried—was, in his words, a lesson in integrity. “When you try to build something with integrity, you sometimes feel lonely, because you see a lot of people who don't have it around you. Then you watch The Met’s integrity about preserving things, and you think—OK, fine. I’ll be more integral about my business. That’s the only way forward.”

Before I left, I asked what he’d want people to take from this year, from the store and the collection both. He didn’t hesitate. “Go to museums more. There lies the truth about who you are and where you came from.”

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