Table of Contents
Dubai: Nine months ago, Bhavitha Mandava was a name most people outside fashion had never heard. This week she walked the Venice Film Festival red carpet in a Chanel gown that took an atelier 1,250 hours to embroider.
The Hyderabad-born model made her Venice debut at the 83rd edition of the festival, attending the premiere of Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People? in the closing look from Chanel’s Resort 2027 collection. It is the kind of appointment that used to take models a decade to earn.
The dress, by the numbers
The aqua and turquoise piece, designed by Chanel artistic director Matthieu Blazy, carries 30,000 domed heart-shaped sequins in graduated shades of iridescent sky blue and deep turquoise. A further 96,000 oval sequins sit across the flounces at the back and hem. Chanel’s Lesage atelier spent roughly 1,250 hours on the embroidery alone.
The effect is deliberate. The graduated blues are meant to read as light moving across water, with the flounces stitched directly onto the back and hem to suggest something shell-like surfacing from below.
Mandava kept the styling quiet around it. A camellia brooch in blue and green sequins, earrings in gold-tone metal and red resin, silver strappy sandals mostly hidden by the hem, and straight black hair worn sleek. No competing jewellery, no elaborate hair.
Mandava’s fashion steps
Her previous major red carpet went the other way entirely.
At the 2026 Met Gala, Mandava arrived in what looked, at a glance, like a quarter-zip jumper and jeans. Social media was not kind. Comments questioned whether she had failed to find anything to wear.
The look was custom Chanel in silk organza, a fabric that is notoriously difficult to work with precisely because of how light it is. More to the point, it was a direct reference to the outfit she was wearing when a scout from 28Models approached her at Atlantic Terminal station in Brooklyn in 2024.
Blazy had already used the same reference once, dressing her in a beige quarter-zip and stonewashed jeans to open Chanel’s Métiers d’Art show in a disused New York subway station in December 2025. That appearance made her the first Indian model to open a Chanel show.
The year in between
The intervening months have been unusually compressed even by fashion standards.
Mandava closed Chanel’s spring haute couture show in January as the bride. Covers of British Vogue and i-D followed. In the spring, Chanel named her a house ambassador.
“Smart, down-to-earth, she emanates a sense of deep joy,” Blazy said in the statement announcing the appointment. Mandava, responding at the time, spoke about Blazy’s approach to the house balancing newness with respect for its history, and described the ambassadorship as an honour.
None of it was planned. She had been studying, first architecture in India, then a master’s at NYU, and graduated in May 2025 with two degrees already having walked for Bottega Veneta, Dior and Chanel. Her initial answer to the scout was no. She reconsidered when the conversation turned to student debt.
What she has said about it
Speaking to British Vogue before the Met Gala, Mandava described trying to stay present in these moments rather than getting stuck analysing them, and suggested some experiences only make sense in retrospect, once there has been time to absorb them.
She has been more direct about what visibility of this kind might do for other people. Talking to the same magazine in May, she said she thinks about young brown girls seeing her and registering a shift in what seems available to them, because she recognises that feeling from her own life.
“I just want to show up as myself, honestly and fully,” she told the magazine.
