India, Oct. 8 -- There are places in Delhi that come with their own set of memories. For me, one of my earliest memories of the theatre is watching The Little Mermaid at the Kamani Auditorium as a child. So, walking into Kamani last night for CORD's first-ever fashion presentation and spotting a mermaid motif on the stage felt almost too on the nose. A small, serendipitous reminder of what the evening was ultimately about: nostalgia, memory and the strange way fragments of childhood stay with us.

This time, though, there was no Little Mermaid waiting in the wings but a child looking for her mother. For its Fall-Winter 2026 presentation, CORD turned Kamani into a theatrical, dreamlike world, working with multidisciplinary art and storytel...