Over the last century, Indian women’s lives changed considerably, and their clothing changed alongside them. Education expanded, women began entering universities and different occupations, and more women started working, travelling, socialising and occupying public spaces in ways they hadn’t before. What’s interesting is that none of this simply pushed women from Indian clothes into Western ones.

The change was not simply that women needed different clothes. But it was that clothing increasingly had to do more than one thing. An outfit could no longer be tied as closely to one fixed way of dressing. It had to be practical, adaptable and easy to wear in different circumstances.

Subscribe now

As women moved into universities, workplaces and public life more generally, their existing garments had to accommodate those changes. The Brahmika style, associated with Jnanadanandini Devi, brought a more structured way of wearing the sari, with pleats and a drape that made it easier to wear while going out and moving through public life. The sari didn’t disappear when women started spending more time outside the home. It was rearranged so it could keep up with that life.

The salwar kameez became another way Indian clothing could accommodate this changing everyday life. As it became an important everyday garment for women, not only in North India but in other parts of the country too, it offered more ease of movement than a sari while still being recognisably Indian. It suited the demands of university, work and travel. It remained recognisably Indian while fitting into a changing lifestyle.

That adjustment continued beyond the outfit itself, into how the outfit was actually put together. Traditionally, the suit was a three-piece combination of kameez, salwar and dupatta. Today, the dupatta isn’t always necessary. Plenty of suits and kurta-and-pant combinations are worn without one, and that’s become completely acceptable in many everyday contexts. The outfit itself became less fixed as the situations women wore it in changed.

The short kurti worn with jeans takes that same loosening a step further. An Indian piece could also move into a wardrobe that held jeans, T-shirts and other Western clothes, without needing a full traditional outfit around it to still count as Indian dress. A look like the T-shirt-and-salwar combination from Jab We Met captured this particularly well. An Indian silhouette could sit comfortably next to something that wasn’t. Women could move between Indian and Western clothing depending on what the day called for, or simply what they felt like wearing.

There isn’t one reason Indian women continued wearing Indian clothing, and there doesn’t need to be. The salwar kameez is practical. It gives the feeling of a long dress while offering the practicality of separate pieces, and it can be beautiful and comfortable at once. Sarees carry a strong emotional pull for a lot of women, tied to memories of mothers and grandmothers. They get worn for graduations, festivals and other occasions that women genuinely look forward to.

There’s a social dimension too. Women have often been expected to carry more of the responsibility for preserving a household’s culture and reputation through their appearance than men have. Some women simply like wearing Indian clothes, some wear them out of social expectation, and for a lot of women it’s several of these at once.

But Indian clothing hasn’t simply survived. It has continued to behave like fashion. Suit silhouettes keep changing. Sometimes churidars are popular, sometimes straight cuts, sometimes palazzos. Indian jewellery goes through the same cycles, with different jhumka and bangle styles coming in and out of fashion.

If Indian clothing were only being preserved, it would mostly stay still. But the fact that its silhouettes, styling and accessories keep changing shows that women are still making use of it in the present. Something preserved continues to exist while mostly being stored or worn occasionally. Something alive keeps being worn, restyled and brought back in new forms.

That is also why it doesn't need to look the same to remain Indian. If it changes a great deal, even in ways we might not recognise, that is not proof it disappeared; rather it is proof that it has evolved. People from two or three centuries ago might look at today’s silhouettes and drapes and find some of them unfamiliar.

And even today, what we see as Indian fashion is not always what Indian women wear most. But the way Indian fashion is represented can make this everyday change harder to see. The clothes that dominate luxury fashion are easier to notice, photograph and associate with the idea of Indian fashion, while everyday Indian clothing is simply part of ordinary life.

But luxury fashion is only one part of the picture. The much larger story is happening in everyday wardrobes, where Indian clothing isn’t being saved for a special occasion or kept around simply because it is traditional. It is being worn, mixed, changed and chosen alongside everything else.

Indian clothing has remained part of everyday life because it has been able to change with it. What makes it Indian is not that it stays the same, but that it continues to belong to the lives of the women who wear it.

When I started thinking about buying clothes for my wardrobe, I realised I didn't just want to keep adding pieces to it. I wanted to know what I was actually building. I wanted my wardrobe to be conscious.

I don’t want the clothes in it to exist just because of some Pinterest images. I don’t want to dress merely because something looks elegant, sophisticated, trendy, or because other people approve of it.

It sounds like a simple thing to want, until I try to work out what would actually make a wardrobe conscious.

What actually makes a wardrobe conscious?

The first thing that comes to mind is a wardrobe where the clothes have been consciously chosen. They weren’t bought on impulse or simply because something was trending. They have a place in the wardrobe.

Subscribe now

But that becomes harder to define when you look at two different people.

Imagine one person who thinks carefully before every purchase. They have a reason for choosing something before it enters their wardrobe, and they know what place it will have. Now imagine another person who doesn’t think through every purchase in the same way. They know what they want, they know what they own, and they wear and style what’s actually there. One is conscious in how they choose. The other is conscious in how they use.

So when are we actually supposed to be conscious? Buying? Using? Just knowing what’s already there?

The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines consciousness as “an organism’s awareness of something either internal or external to itself.” So if a wardrobe is meant to be conscious, what exactly are we supposed to be aware of?

So let’s strip the question down further. Imagine you had unlimited money, unlimited space, and access to every piece of clothing that exists. No budget, no scarcity, nothing standing in your way. What would your wardrobe actually be?

Maybe consciousness in that situation would simply mean choosing what you genuinely want.

But would you still choose the same things you choose now? Would you still want the same number of clothes? Would the pieces you’d call your genuine favourites stay the same once nothing was stopping you from having everything else too? Or is some of what we call “genuinely wanting” just scarcity quietly doing the deciding for us, dressed up as taste?

At this point, the wardrobe starts wandering into territory that probably belongs more to Socrates than to fashion. It starts to resemble the thought experiment Glaucon gives Socrates (if the usual consequences of our actions disappeared, would we still make the same choices?) The question isn’t exactly the same here, but the resemblance is hard to ignore.

Let’s get back to the clothes. Even with unlimited resources, someone can be very deliberate about what they wear. A public figure might deliberately choose an outfit for one appearance, thinking about the cameras, the audience and the image it creates. But if the garment is worn once for that moment and then discarded, calling that a conscious relationship still doesn’t sit right.

So the wardrobe isn’t only made at the point of buying. What happens after the purchase becomes part of it too: how the clothes are used, styled, cared for and kept. The reason you bought something matters, but it isn’t the whole measure. It’s about what kind of relationship exists between you and the garment over the time you have it.

For me, use and care matter more than the other variables, because they tell us what happens to the garment after it becomes ours.

Once you see it that way, there isn’t one single thing that makes a wardrobe conscious. Sustainability, consumption, environmental responsibility, the brands you buy from, how much you own, why you buy, how you use your clothes and how you care for them can all become part of that relationship. Being conscious about one of these things doesn’t automatically mean being conscious about all the others.

Sustainability is probably the one people reach for first when they hear “conscious,” and it belongs somewhere in the picture. Buying from a sustainable brand doesn’t automatically make the relationship with your clothes conscious. You can still buy continuously without thinking about whether each new piece actually belongs in your wardrobe. Sustainability is one variable among several, not a stand-in for the whole relationship.

Can someone have a very good relationship with their clothes without having a conscious one?

Someone might love their clothes, wear them for years, mend them when they wear out and buy very little. All of that could be true, and they might never have consciously thought about their relationship with their clothes at all. The behaviour is there. The awareness of the behaviour might not be.

A good relationship with your clothes is not necessarily a conscious relationship with your clothes.

This is where the phrase “conscious wardrobe” starts to become difficult to pin down. For one person, it might mean conscious buying. For another, conscious use. For someone else, it might mean sustainability or simply knowing what they own.

Maybe the more useful question is not whether a wardrobe is conscious, but how conscious your relationship with your clothes actually is.

I don’t know if I have a conscious wardrobe now. But I do know that I am more conscious of the term “conscious wardrobe.”

A little about Anamika Khanna

Her career began almost by accident. In 1995 her friends encouraged her to submit her sketches for the Damania Fashion Award. She won and had to put together a full collection without really knowing much about making garments yet. That win became the start of her label. There was no fixed roadmap going in which gives some context to the instinctive way she has continued to describe her process.

In 2007 she showed at Paris Fashion Week becoming the first Indian Female Designer to do so. Around that period she has described two realisations.

One was that Indian designers didn’t really know how to edit — that the instinct was to put everything into a single piece: more embroidery more colour more cuts all at once.

The other was that a lot of Indian design was still operating on the assumption that if you could embroider well you were automatically a designer.

Subscribe now

That first idea, ‘editing’ is one of the easiest things to see across her collections. Even when a garment carries embroidery draping volume and several details at once, there’s usually somewhere else in the same look or the same collection that’s been left plain. Nothing is required to compete with everything else for attention.

I have watched her runways across the years to understand her better as a designer, so let’s dive a little deeper.

Delhi Couture Week 2010

This collection drew from royalty: angrakhas, the drape of a maharaja’s robe reworked into something a king might wear if he existed now (rather than in a court painting). Voluminous skirts were paired with tailored blazers, some hemlines cut into frills. The clothes weren’t fully structured but they weren’t fully flowy either. They sat somewhere between the two which is a tension that comes back in later collections as well.

Net was used to let parts of the body show without the clothes feeling overtly erotic about it. It read more like the body was simply being allowed to be part of the look rather than the exposure being the point of the garment. Tulle gave the lehengas volume without adding real weight, so they moved with the models rather than dragging behind them.

What stands out in this collection is that it doesn’t stay inside one silhouette. The Indian references weren’t being reproduced as they were; they were being reshaped through tailoring, proportion, and styling.

LFW Summer Resort 2011 — Androgynous

The theme was named outright this time: androgynous. Live dhol played through the show while the clothes borrowed heavily from menswear: bandhgala tops, collared shirts, structured jackets, all reworked for women alongside capes and sarees draped over jodhpuri pants.

A bandhgala top isn’t simply feminised here; it’s placed somewhere it isn’t expected to be and made to hold its own there. That pattern returns in later collections too: familiar garments showing up in combinations or contexts they don’t usually belong to.

This is also where the cape first begins to emerge as a recurring element in her work. I

LFW 2015 — Sculpt

The collection was called Sculpt and when I watched it it didn’t read as deconstructed in the way the word usually gets used. Nothing looked torn apart or chaotic; it felt controlled.

Here ‘sculpting’ feels closer to taking something recognisably Indian and rebuilding it for a contemporary wearer rather than distorting it for visual effect. The show opened with white sarees, capes and skirts with gold structured jewellery and men in plain dhotis before moving into jodhpuri pantsuits worn with dupattas and dhoti skirts finished with intricate embroidery.

The fabric stayed soft and flowy underneath it and the embroidery gave shape only where the garment needed it. Partway through, the palette shifted into black and bronze with cuts appearing in the cape and elsewhere. The cape itself kept changing from look to look; sometimes softer, sometimes more structured.

ICW 2016 — When Time Stood Still

This collection was much more romantic. Some models were seated at the start of the show as though paused mid-party while Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra played in the background — enough to establish the mood before a single look moved.

White and ivory dominated the collection, appearing across anarkalis, lehengas, capes and shararas. The embroidery was concentrated on tops, capes and borders with large stretches of each piece left plain. Pearls and three-dimensional flowers ran through the collection alongside dori work and zardozi. A long heavily embroidered cape appeared as well another variation on the form.

Again the amount of plain fabric sitting next to the embroidered sections is what gives the collection its restraint.

LFW 2018

This collection took its cues from tribes in different parts of the world staged with a streetwear and grunge sensibility. It opened with a dance performance set to dhol and other percussion in a dark water-soaked setting. Models came out in boots, fringed skirts, sheer fabric, mostly in bronze and brown.

Separates, fringe jackets, boots and other pieces that could behave as contemporary wardrobe items appeared first while the Indian references — sarees, dupattas, gowns and floral embroidery — entered later and more separately rather than being folded into the same look from the start. It is one of the few collections where the Indian and contemporary elements seem to take turns rather than occupy the same garment.

The nude palette treated different skin tones as part of the design rather than assuming a single default. Organza fringing is used in different pieces giving them a new structure. Later the embroidery became heavier, with structured tops and blazers leaving less visible plain space than some of her other work. The collection also shows that editing doesn’t mean keeping every garment minimal; some looks carry much more embroidery and structure while the collection still has room to breathe.

LFW 2021 — Timeless the World

Shown during the pandemic in a phygital format, the collection revolved around impermanence.

It began with four models dressed entirely in white. Three artists — Deepak Kumar Saw, Smriti Lekha Gogoi and Amlan Dutta — then painted floral and abstract work directly onto the garments while the models stood still. They remained on the stage throughout the show as the other models walked through the collection presenting embroidered pieces and loose bathrobe-style outfits for men.

Once the collection had been shown all the models came together on the stage and then almost as if someone had snapped their fingers they disappeared into dust. After that the paint on the originally white garments disappeared leaving those models standing in white again as they had been at the beginning.

The idea behind the collection was impermanence — that anything built is eventually going to come apart and that whatever comes apart can be rebuilt. The sequence made that idea visible: the clothes are created and transformed the people wearing them disappear and then the collection returns to its starting point.

ICW 2022

This collection drew from the clothing of Hindu deities, apsaras, and ancestral dress staged under dim red lighting with a slightly unsettling mood. It opened with red dresses and three-dimensional flowers, moved into sheer embroidered gold pieces and ripped silk and continued through embroidered blazers reworked with cuts at the waist. Long shredded capes appeared in different fabrics and colours making the cape much rougher and more damaged here than in the earlier collections.

Even with the cuts, embroidery and sheerness none of it felt like too much. There was more visible skin here than in some of her earlier couture work and pantsuits and other menswear-inspired pieces appeared more than usual.

Most strikingly there was no lehenga anywhere in the collection. At a couture week where the lehenga is so closely associated with Indian bridal and occasion wear that absence becomes significant. It reads less like a rejection of tradition and more like an argument that a modern Indian bride doesn’t have to default to a lehenga at all — that a cape, a suit, or a jumpsuit can hold the same weight while staying connected to Indian craft and dress.

It is one of the clearest moments where Khanna seems less interested in reproducing what occasionwear is expected to look like and more interested in what a contemporary Indian woman might actually want to wear.

ICW 2023

The show opened with a white dress under a three-dimensional fur-like jacket, moving into softer fabrics, fluid drapes and long capes. A women’s sherwani appeared — a garment normally read as menswear placed without much fanfare into a women’s collection alongside dhoti skirts and lehengas worn with a shrug instead of a dupatta.

That sherwani is a small move but it’s part of a pattern across her work: she doesn’t usually make a loud statement about crossing gendered categories of clothing.

Ivory stayed central to the palette as it does in most of her collections. The show ended with more colourful prints and embroidery that felt noticeably more playful than the rest of it.

ICW 2026 — Moonlit Palace

Her most recent collection was shown at Falaknuma Palace and built around lost civilisations and what a culture chooses to remember with the palace itself functioning as part of the narrative rather than simply as a striking location. It took the inspiration from Kalighat painting from Kolkata and embroidery, mirrorwork and textile traditions associated with Barmer in Rajasthan.

The show opened with a large voluminous skirt, a red blouse and the model’s face covered in net.

Subscribe now

Sherwanis appeared again here continuing from the previous year’s collection. There were embroidered pantsuits with delicate surface detail and sheer kaftan-inspired pieces. One dress had braided knotted detailing with the sleeves twisting upward into something close to the shape of a bag; the same idea also appeared in other looks too. The palette stayed mostly within white and ivory, with purple used as an accent in a few pieces.

One dress appeared to be made entirely of red thread without a visible base fabric underneath it. There were Victorian-influenced necklines throughout parts of the show along with voluminous skirts that created a striking silhouette (which also reminded me of the Queen Mother from ancient K-dramas)

One look left the model’s upper body almost entirely bare with only two small embroidered coverings over the breasts paired with a heavily embroidered draped skirt. Compared to her earlier work this collection is noticeably with more visible skin and more open necklines throughout. The treatment of the body that was already visible in 2010 is pushed further here — the body becomes part of the garment rather than something the clothes are simply working to conceal or reveal.

Anamika Khanna doesn’t have one fixed look that explains her work. What keeps returning instead are certain ways of treating clothing — the use of ivory, draping, capes and jackets. Taking traditional Indian clothing apart and reconstructing it through a contemporary lens.

The cape is probably the clearest example. It’s soft and understated in 2011 more structured and shifting in 2015 romantic and heavily embroidered in 2016, and shredded and more heavily worked by 2022. It keeps evolving across different collections.

The same pattern holds elsewhere. The saree is repeatedly reworked by pairing it with pants and jackets or by changing the way it is draped. One of the things she seems to have understood early on is how not to get too much of anything — finding the balance between too much and too little.

A lot of contemporary Indian clothing carries real social weight. A saree, for example can come loaded with expectations about occasion formality and how it is supposed to be worn. Khanna’s work offers a way to keep the connection to Indian clothing craft and cultural reference without being bound by all the expectations that usually come attached to them.

A person doesn’t necessarily have to choose between ‘wearing something Indian’ and ‘wearing something that feels like their own’ — her clothes make room for both at once.

After I published the last essay, I kept thinking about the question it left open: what the 2020s actually look like while we’re still inside them. The longer I sat with it, the more it felt like the wrong problem to be stuck on. Not having one recognizable look might be the smaller issue. Something bigger seemed to be sitting underneath it.

The characteristics of this decade is not something new, but the ability to wear what every previous decade has. So much of it seems to be reaching backward. Not toward one particular era either, but toward whichever one a person happens to be drawn to, in whatever direction, at whatever moment.

Maybe that’s closer to what’s actually happening. Not simply the absence of a 2020s look, but the presence of so many other looks, all showing up in the present at once. If that’s true, the interesting question stops being what the 2020s look like. It becomes why so much of the past is suddenly this available.

Subscribe now

It shows up plainly enough once you start looking for it. Someone in Y2K low-rise jeans standing next to someone in a 90s slip dress, standing next to someone dressed like it’s 1978. Not one look competing to become the decade’s signature, but different decades sitting inside the same afternoon.

Now, because of social media, you can know what people are wearing in any part of the world. Fashion has become a lot more accessible, and everything is documented compared to back then. An afternoon online can move someone between decades, designers, collections, celebrities and subcultures that would once have been separated by time, geography, and whoever happened to control a magazine or a television slot.

That changes what the past actually is to someone living now. It stops behaving like something that already happened and finished. It starts behaving more like material sitting there, available for use. There are millions of pieces sitting in the past, and now you can actually go looking for them. Someone can find an old collection, save the images, learn the designer’s name, track down whoever is selling an original piece, and build an outfit around all of it in a single evening. Different versions of fashion history end up sitting beside each other, available to different people at the same moment.

That searchability changes something else too. Nostalgia doesn’t need any kind of memory now. Someone can feel real longing for a period they never lived in, because what they’re actually responding to isn’t the period itself. It’s the image of it, already edited down into something recognizable by everything that happened to survive and keep circulating.

Let me show you this with the example of the Y2K fashion aesthetic. In 2001, low-rise jeans were simply part of what was being sold that year; nobody needed to call the look Y2K, because nobody was standing outside the period looking back at it. But now, if someone wears Y2K, they are not really just wearing it. It is an ‘inspired’ outfit. They are consciously bringing an outfit together and trying to recreate that look.

If we take a look at the different microtrends, the same thing is happening. The micro-trends were basically inspired by things from the past. Not every micro-trend, but a large chunk of the micro-trends that became popular. They are coming with an implied reference point, a packaged version of some earlier period or subculture, given a name and an online community that makes it easy to find and enter. Indie sleaze, cottagecore, whimsygoth, 90s minimalism, and the rest: we can see similarities with hippie culture, goth subculture, and other fashion movements.

There is nothing like fashion of the moment. Individual trends can still get enormous, with millions of people ending up in similar clothes. What’s harder is deciding which one of those represents the whole landscape when there are so many visible ones running simultaneously.

Subscribe now

Another reason the fashion landscape has become harder to reduce to one thing is that there is a lot of visibility. A lot of what we think of as the fashion of a decade was really what was most visible through Western media: movies, celebrities, magazines, designers and the cities that got documented. While they are still leading institutions in the fashion industry but more places and communities can now show their own clothing directly, without waiting for one of those gatekeepers to notice them first.

When almost anything new can become a trend, vintage becomes one of the places you can go when you don’t want to look like everyone else.

And it is one of the reasons that thrifting became so popular. While sustainability and price are the reasons people usually give, and both are real but it is not the only reasons. There are so many collections, millions of pieces, and a lot of pieces are forgotten. So it becomes about finding the best one, having the best eye, knowing how to find the piece that other people don’t have. The appeal isn’t necessarily that nobody else has it. It’s that there is a decent chance nobody else around you will.

Resale platforms like The RealReal and eBay turn that search into a market. The past stops sitting in the past. It becomes something you can browse, photograph, price, buy, and put on again.

Designers are doing their own version of this through their houses’ archives. When Demna arrived at Gucci in 2026, he went straight back into the house’s history, drawing on the Tom Ford era of the 1990s and early 2000s for his debut collection. The old references aren’t simply being reproduced. They’re being taken from an old collection and made new again through the designer’s own interpretation.

Fashion has always taken from the past and from history. But this time we can kind of pinpoint it. We can see multiple different decades being referenced at the same time.

What’s different is the scale, the simultaneity, and how conscious the references have become. Several periods get referenced at once instead of one at a time. The references are unusually easy to reach. And the person reaching for them almost always knows exactly which period they’re reaching for. Someone in 2001 wasn’t trying to look like 2001. Someone in 2026 can try to look like 2001 on purpose.

I don’t think the abundance of fashion means that nothing new can be created. Designers are still experimenting with things that owe nothing to any prior decade. Some of that work will probably become someone else’s historical reference eventually. It just exists right now alongside an enormous, visible archive of everything that came before it.

So instead of trying to find one particular look, we could look at what is common between all the things happening.

By now a single garment feels like the wrong answer. And the thing that keeps occurring, underneath the Y2K and the 90s and the archival pieces and the microtrends, is simultaneity. Different parts of fashion history staying available at once. Nobody having to wait for one era to finish before reaching for the next. The past staying active while the present is still being made.

And that is the closest thing the 2020s have as a fashion signature. What happens to all of this once memory starts filtering it is a different question. The 2020s might be unusually hard to remember cleanly, precisely because so many different images were competing to represent them while they were still happening.

Maybe fifty years from now, one image still rises out of all this and becomes the decade, the way shoulder pads became the 80s. Or maybe what survives instead is the coexistence itself. A decade in which fashion history stopped feeling finished, and became something you could browse, enter, and wear.

The 2020s may eventually be remembered as the decade that wore every other decade.

I don’t mean the clothes are literally identical, of course—designers use different textiles, distinct embroidery techniques, varied proportions, and custom palettes. But underneath all of that, the broader visual language usually stays familiar. That’s what made it feel repetitive to me. It doesn’t really mean nothing is changing, but that the differences didn’t feel like they were changing anything essential.

That left me with two questions: why does Indian designer fashion feel like everyone is doing roughly the same thing, and why aren't designers taking bigger risks?

Subscribe now

So I started looking more closely at individual designers and what they were actually doing.

Take Sabyasachi’s use of khadi. At first, it might seem like a trivial choice to use khadi in couture and bridal wear. But khadi is not just a textile in Indian history; it carries the Swadeshi movement (self-sufficiency movement during Independence), the manual labour, the common man and the idea of India that has nothing to do with contemporary luxury.

Bringing it into couture and bridal wear therefore means putting a material with those associations into a world where luxury usually means something very different. The risk isn't in using an unusual fabric. It's in asking whether something associated with simplicity and struggle can be made to signify luxury.

Raw Mango approaches the fashion philosophy from another direction. Its saris can be remarkably simple, which is precisely what makes them interesting here. Aditi Rao Hydari's red Raw Mango sari at Cannes is a good example. There is no elaborate embroidery or heavily worked surface announcing that it is an expensive designer garment. Much of what gives the sari its value comes from the textile itself — its handwoven tradition, craftsmanship and history.

In a market where luxury is often expected to make its value visible through embroidery, embellishment and surface work, presenting something this restrained as luxury goes against that expectation. The risk is in making simplicity itself desirable.

Rimzim Dadu takes the question much further. Here, the risk isn't mainly about changing the meaning of an existing material or making luxury look restrained. The material itself becomes the place where the design language changes. She’s spent years working with steel wire, silicone, leather, disintegrating fabric and rebuilding it into a material language that feels unlike the conventions of mainstream Indian luxury fashion.

And then there’s Bloni, which isn’t interesting because it’s “dangerous,” but because it isn’t particularly interested in holding onto the masculine/feminine division that much of the Indian clothing market still relies on. It calls its own approach gender-agnostic (an approach that is not limited by a person’s gender identity).

In a culture where gender and sexuality remain difficult subjects, even within a younger generation that is increasingly questioning those boundaries, refusing to design entirely around the categories the market already understands carries its own kind of risk. Instead of simply changing the garment within an existing category, the category itself becomes something the designer is willing to question.

By the time I had looked at these four designers, my original assumption was getting blurred. They were clearly doing things differently. But none of these examples looked like the kind of risk-taking I had initially been looking for. There was no need for the clothes to become completely unwearable, or for the designer to treat fashion purely as an artistic statement.

The risk could be much more specific: changing the meaning of a material, making luxury look unusually simple, building a new material language, or questioning a category that most of the market takes for granted.

But I still had to account for the other half of what I originally felt. Why did it feel repetitive to begin with, if all of this is happening?

Part of the reason may be that much of the innovation happens inside a fairly stable overall framework. A designer can completely reinvent the embroidery while still making the familiar lehenga for the same customer, the same occasion, and the same idea of what luxury is supposed to look like. Variation isn’t the same as changing the formula. So my original observation wasn’t totally wrong, but I was just looking at the wrong level.

Subscribe now

Some of this comes down to what the market rewards. Indian luxury fashion has a huge relationship with weddings and occasion-wear, and that changes what a designer is actually making. It is not only a design proposition. It is something a real person has to want to buy and wear, often for one of the most significant days of their life. That creates an obvious pull toward familiarity. A customer can want something new without wanting something completely unfamiliar.

So the market has gotten very good at rewarding small changes within an established formula — the same kind of silhouette with new embroidery, the same category with a new treatment, the same idea of luxury with a new material. That doesn’t make designers unimaginative. It means the market has learned exactly how much difference it can absorb at once.

The environment around fashion matters too, beyond any single designer or market. Fashion capitals such as Paris have had designer-fashion institutions for generations. That means people have had much more time to encounter fashion not only as clothing, but as collections, movements, ideas and a cultural language of its own. India obviously has an enormous and deep relationship with clothing. What is newer here is the institution of designer fashion itself.

That is what makes Manish Malhotra’s Paris show interesting. He has one of the most established visual identities in Indian designer fashion, built over decades around glamour, embellishment, Bollywood and bridal wear. But when he made his Paris haute couture debut, the collection looked noticeably different from the design language he had become known for. The silhouettes were larger and more sculptural, and the clothes seemed less tied to the familiar proportions and visual language of his Indian bridal and Bollywood work.

It wasn’t just a new collection from the same designer; it felt like a different side of the designer had been brought forward.

And I don’t think the point is that Paris somehow made him more creative. It could be the audience, the expectations of the stage, the freedom that comes with showing there, or simply a desire to explore something he hadn’t explored before. Something clearly changed. Was it the prestige of the setting? The desire to be seen internationally as doing something new? A different commercial goal? Or did Paris give him the occasion to pursue something he had already wanted to try?

I don’t know. But if the same designer can produce something this different in another environment, it raises the question of how much of a designer’s creative vocabulary is shaped by the context they’re designing within, rather than by the designer alone.

By this point, my initial assumption that Indian designer fashion was simply repetitive and not risk-taking doesn't hold up. The overall design language is still relatively narrow, but there is innovation happening inside it.

But the market that rewards that familiar vocabulary isn’t fixed either. Marriage as an institution is changing. People are marrying later, and younger generations are approaching weddings differently — in what they want from them, how they celebrate them, and how much they want to spend on them.

A younger customer might have a different relationship with bridal clothing, rewearing, luxury, gender, or even what counts as a special occasion. As those expectations change, designers will have to respond to them, but they can also shape what the next generation comes to want. Bridal and occasionwear make up such a large part of Indian luxury fashion that even a gradual shift in what people want from those clothes could eventually change the whole industry.

The designers already experimenting in small, and sometimes not-so-visible ways may not be exceptions at all. They may be early signs of where the industry could go.

The question now I am more interested in isn’t why Indian designer fashion looks the way it does right now, but what it might look like in those few years.

The 2020s don’t behave like that.

A while ago I was going down a Y2K rabbit hole — moodboards, low-rise jeans, baby tees, halter tops — and then I noticed that all of it was instantly recognisable as a decade’s look, even though I never lived through that decade myself. Somehow, an entire era had become a handful of recognizable images.

And it struck me that I couldn’t do the same thing for the decade I’m actually living in right now. I could picture a past I never saw more easily than I could picture the present I’m standing in. Why can I picture a decade I never lived through more easily than the one I’m living through?

Subscribe now

Perhaps the question isn’t really about this decade; it may be the assumption that decades naturally arrive with a recognizable look. People living through the 80s probably weren’t walking around thinking, this is the iconic look of the decade. They were just getting dressed. Wearing what was in the stores, following whatever trends were around, living an ordinary Tuesday that felt no more historical than any other day.

If that’s true, then a decade doesn’t announce itself while it’s happening. It only starts to look like something afterwards.

But how? How does a decade go from being lived, formless, in real time, to being something you can picture instantly decades later?

I think the answer is memory or more accurately, the way memory edits. In the 80s, that filter was a small number of institutions: magazines, television, a handful of celebrities and designers. Their influence lay less in deciding what people wore than in deciding what everyone saw. And what gets seen is far more likely to be remembered. Countless other styles existed on the ground, in ordinary towns, on ordinary people, and most of them never made it past that filter at all.

What we remember as “the 80s” isn’t everything that happened. It’s what survived and documented.

That idea is bigger than fashion. It’s how memory works in general — personal or cultural. We don’t remember everything that happened to us either; we remember what got repeated, reinforced, told back to us often enough to stick. A decade’s image forms the same way. Cultures, like people, remember what they repeat. The stories, images and symbols that keep circulating eventually come to stand in for everything else.

Everything changes once that shared filtering process disappears — when there’s no longer a small number of hands deciding what gets remembered.

That’s the actual shift underneath the 2020s. The shift goes beyond greater access to fashion because now everyone has access to an audience. For most of the last century, fashion largely passed through a relatively small number of editors, publications and broadcasters before it reached the wider public. That bottleneck no longer exists. The result isn’t just an explosion of images. It’s that we’re no longer looking at the same images.

More content is only the beginning; the stranger consequence is that two people can each open Instagram at the same moment, both look at their own feed, and both honestly believe they’re seeing what everyone is wearing right now — while looking at two completely different fashion worlds.

Share

There isn’t really a single “what everyone’s wearing” anymore. Everyone now has their own version of “right now.” For a decade to become a decade, people don’t just have to wear similar things. They have to notice the same things together.

But what does that actually feel like day to day, rather than as an abstract idea?

Skinny jeans are a good example. The jeans themselves never changed—same cut, same denim, same fit, no redesign. What changed was how we saw them. First everyone wore them then, seemingly overnight, the public taste shifted. Suddenly they were outdated, uncomfortable, something you had to justify wearing.

Now, a few years later, people are debating whether they’re back or not. I never actually stopped wearing them myself (I’ve always preferred something more fitted than baggy), but there was a stretch where it genuinely felt like a small risk to wear something the collective had already agreed to reject.

If public taste can reverse itself twice within a handful of years, with nothing about the object ever changing, how could a single look ever hold still long enough to define anything?

The 2020s resist a single image because the conditions that once produced those images have changed. There is no longer a common filtering process through which most fashion passes, and very little stays around long enough to settle into memory.

One day, someone who never lived through the 2020s might picture them as effortlessly as I picture the 80s today. But that picture doesn’t exist yet. Cultural memory is still deciding what survives.

Support Fashion Interlude

It's been almost two weeks since I sat down to write this. I wanted to write about it the moment I saw the collection, but university exams made everything hectic and kept pushing it back.

For a while now I've wanted to start a monthly designer spotlight series, and kept putting it off because I didn't think I knew enough yet to write about people who've spent decades in this industry.

But watching Manish Malhotra's Paris debut changed that. I decided to just start and get better at this with time rather than wait until I felt ready.

For more than thirty years, Manish Malhotra has been dressing other people’s stories. Now he finally showed his own in his debut at Paris Couture Week, with a collection titled “Maa.”It reveals a side of his design language I’ve never quite seen on the runway.

The collection is inspired by his mother, who passed away just a few months before the show. You can feel it. Every look feels like part of a larger narrative. The collection unfolds in four chapters: Cocoon, Bond, Becoming, and Abundance.

The show opens with Cocoon, the shelter a mother gives a child. The silhouettes here are rounder, more balloon-shaped, wrapping around the body like something being held. Then it moves into Bond, and the shapes start to open outward. Florals, exaggerated shoulders, dresses shaped like flowers in bloom. It’s not subtle, and it’s not meant to be. It’s a visual metaphor for what her love became.

Look 12 has knotwork running through it, and tassels made from the same thread used in the embroidery. The show notes tie it back to the bond between mother and son, the kind that doesn’t come undone. Looks 13 and 15 use brocade, echoing the sarees he remembers his mother wearing when he was young, reworked with vintage-style embroidery shaped like bangles.

Subscribe now

What struck me most is that the attention isn’t only on embroidery this time. It’s on structure. The silhouettes are doing as much storytelling as the handwork.

Before Couture, There Was Cinema

Malhotra didn’t come up through fashion school. He came up through cinema, watching films obsessively, and somehow that turned into a career. He started as a costume designer in 1990, on the film Swarg. He didn’t show his first solo collection until 1999, and didn’t launch his own label until 2005, which means for over a decade, before “Manish Malhotra” was a brand, he was simply the person dressing Bollywood.

His real breakout came with Rangeela (1995). Urmila Matondkar’s wardrobe transformed the way Bollywood thought about costume design, earning Malhotra the first Filmfare Award for Best Costume Design and establishing his ability to define a character through clothing.

That instinct carried into the rest of the 90s. In Dil Toh Pagal Hai, he dressed Madhuri Dixit in sheer chiffon suits that read as soft and traditional, while Karisma Kapoor got bicycle shorts and sports bras that read as modern and athletic. Same film, two completely different visual languages, both used to tell you who the character was before she said a word. A few years later, Kareena Kapoor’s peach lehenga as “Poo” in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham became the reference point for glamorous Indian heroine dressing. Over two decades later, people still recreate it.

That’s really the throughline for everything that comes after: he didn’t learn fashion from fashion; he learned it by watching stories told through what people wear.

Reinvention as a Design Language

No single collection explains Manish Malhotra’s design language. To understand how Maa fits into his career, it’s worth looking back at a few collections that reveal how his ideas, silhouettes, and priorities have shifted over time.

Share

Elements (2016) stayed almost entirely in pastel: white, ivory, cream, lilac, across 70 outfits built around earth, water, air, and fire. What’s interesting is the restraint in the concept itself. Even fire, the one element you’d expect in reds and oranges, got translated into a soft burnt orange rather than anything loud. It’s nature reimagined like it’s being seen through frosted glass.

The Persian Story, later that same year, swings hard in the opposite direction. Deep maroons, dark pinks, emerald green, azure blue, velvet fabric, gold embroidery. The inspiration was Persian architecture, royalty, and poetry. One lehenga even had an entire fort embroidered into it.

But this is also where the collection stumbles a little. The checked elements mixed in with the velvet don’t quite sit right. They feel imported from somewhere else entirely, out of step with the Persian mood the rest of the collection had already built.

Zween, shown in Doha in 2018, works almost like a colour narrative rather than a static collection. It opens in shades of red, drifts into cream and nude with his signature gold embroidery, moves into soft pinks with a lustrous shine, and closes in black with ivory embroidery replacing the gold. Kaftan-inspired silhouettes, sarees with net drapes, gowns with long capes, all built with a Gulf audience in mind.

The finale look is the standout: Aishwarya Rai in an ombre pink gown, sleeves flowing longer than the silhouette itself, finished in delicate pink beaded embroidery.

Dubai Fashion Week (2025) feels like the moment he starts consciously designing for a different body language. Sequinned gowns. Long white blazer-and-pant sets with embroidery. Pearls, silk blazers, but looser this time, less built around hugging the body, more about movement. It doesn’t read as any less current for it.

If anything, the embroidery gets more selective here, concentrated in places rather than covering everything, while pearls, sequins, and metal detailing still carry his signature through.

Put these collections next to each other, and they don’t look like they belong to the same designer. Different palettes, different inspirations, different silhouettes entirely. There’s some overlap in colour and technique here and there, but not in the bigger picture. It can look scattered. But that inconsistency is also what makes his work difficult to predict.

But Malhotra has said it himself: “Change is the only constant.” That’s basically his whole design philosophy. Every collection gets to be its own world. What carries over isn’t a look, it’s what he learned making the last one, folded quietly into the next.

Returning to Maa

After sitting with all of these collections, Maa reads differently than it did on its own. It’s not a random Paris debut. It’s the most refined version of something he’s been doing quietly across three decades: building a collection around a feeling first, then finding the embroidery and silhouette vocabulary to carry it.

For a man who has spent more than three decades dressing characters for the screen, that makes sense. He’s always designed like someone telling a story first and building a garment around it. Maa is just the most personal version of that instinct yet.

What’s genuinely different this time is what carries the narrative. Maa isn’t leaning on volume of embellishment the way Persian Story or even Zween did. It’s leaning on structure. The silhouette is doing the emotional work, not just the handwork sitting on top of it.

You can see traces of that same instinct just months earlier at the 2026 Met Gala, where instead of centering himself, he built his cape around the artisans who make his work possible. Their names and signatures were stitched into the lining, and small three-dimensional sculptures of tailors at their sewing machines were worked into the design. Same idea as Maa: the story matters as much as the shine.

Is that growth, or a one-off because Paris demanded a different register than Mumbai or Dubai ever did? I’m not fully sure yet. But it’s the first time in years his storytelling instinct and his craftsmanship instinct both got equal billing on a runway, instead of the embroidery doing most of the talking.

The Question Paris Leaves Behind

It was a good debut, and it’s left me curious rather than certain about where he goes from here. Does he keep exploring this more narrative-driven approach, where silhouette carries as much of the emotion as embroidery? Or does he return to the lavish embellishment and visual opulence that have defined much of his career? I don’t think even he knows that yet. But that’s what makes the next collection worth watching.

Whatever comes next won’t simply answer where Manish Malhotra is going. It will answer whether Maa was an exception—or the beginning of a new chapter.

Share Fashion Interlude

I thought of writing about Manish Malhotra’s design philosophy. I couldn’t find the names of his collections, but I did get the names of every Bollywood celebrity who had ever been his showstopper.

This is what happens when you try to write about Indian fashion. The fundamental information simply isn’t documented online. When you do find something, it feels like a pearl in a deep ocean.

Subscribe now

What We Get Instead

It is not that writing about Indian fashion doesn’t exist at all. The big magazines are there — Vogue India, Harper’s Bazaar India, Elle India. But when you open Vogue India’s fashion section, you find celebrities everywhere. What they wore, where they went, what they ate. It reads less like a fashion publication and more like a Bollywood entertainment magazine with a fashion filter. The fashion show section on their website was last updated in September, which made me wonder: have Indian designers not had a single show since then? They have. The record just isn’t there.

For newspapers, fashion means wardrobe malfunctions and red carpet arrivals. Style and fashion become the same word, and the conversation ends there. The industry is treated as gossip, not culture.

There are a few independent writers and online publications doing something closer to real fashion writing, but they are too few to cover something this vast. As readers, learners, and independent writers, we are left filling ourselves with celebrity styling and whatever scraps exist.

Why It Happened

To understand the gap, you have to understand how Indian fashion began and how young it actually is.

Names like Bhanu Athiya, Rohit Khosla, and Ritu Kumar represent the first wave of what we would call Indian fashion designers, emerging through the 1960s and 70s. Before that, there were tailors, craftspeople, textile traditions, but not designers in the way the word came to mean. The designer as a figure, as an identity, grew slowly through the 70s and began finding ground in the 80s, partly because institutions like NIFT started producing formally trained talent, and partly because a few names were establishing themselves in a market that had never seen this before.

Modern fashion entered public consciousness more as an aspiration than as a cultural conversation. To much of the public, a fashion designer was little more than an elevated version of a darzi. To build their identity, to separate themselves from that perception, they needed visibility. And the most powerful visibility available in India was Bollywood. So fashion borrowed Bollywood’s face. Celebrities became showstoppers. Designers got exposure through stardom rather than through their work.

The PR industry grew alongside this, making the celebrity-designer relationship more structured and more permanent. Celebrity culture helped build the industry, gave it faces, audiences and occasions. But over time, it began replacing conversations about the work itself. Because the PR machinery around celebrities was always stronger than anything built around the design, coverage followed that gravity. The celebrity got the headline. The collection became the backdrop.

Subscribe now

Meanwhile, the biggest business in Indian fashion was never the runway. It was bridal wear. The billion-dollar wedding industry made bridal the most reliable, most lucrative part of what these designers did. Documenting the work, naming collections, recording looks, and building an archive were never a business priority because it was never a business need.

As the internet became the primary place where fashion history was archived elsewhere, Indian fashion entered the digital era without building comparable public records. The documentation simply didn't follow the industry into the digital age.

When Celebrity Became the Story

After every fashion week, the only headline anyone writes is about the showstopper. The front rows are filled with influencers who are not fashion people, invited for reach rather than knowledge. What they show their audiences is which celebrity sat in which seat, not what the designer actually made that season. The celebrity became the measure of a show’s success, and the collection went undocumented.

This is not to say Indian designers aren’t selling. Many of them are. Their pieces move, their order books fill, their names carry weight in certain rooms. But selling is different from being written about, documented, and understood. A sold-out collection with no critical record still disappears.

And there is a deeper consequence. Indian designers have increasingly sought Western validation, showing at the Big Four fashion weeks, and getting covered by international press. While more exposure is genuinely valuable, it also reflects something uncomfortable: the Indian fashion week never became serious enough for people to care deeply about what happened there. International coverage often gets more detailed, critical attention than equivalent work shown at home, which quietly creates the impression that validation abroad carries more weight.

If no one writes about Indian fashion with depth, why would anyone treat it with depth?

The economics of fashion media itself reinforces the imbalance. The advertising problem compounds everything. Publications are funded by the brands they cover. The same big names get the space, the coverage, the visibility. Smaller designers, newer designers, and younger voices get nothing. Independent media that could exist outside this system barely exists, leaving much of Indian fashion undocumented unless you already belong to the industry.

A Gap in the Record

The result is not just a gap in writing. It is a gap in the record.

You cannot find the names of all the collections a designer has shown. Sometimes you cannot find the name of their most recent collection. Information as basic as how many looks were in a show or who participated in a particular season often isn't publicly available. A designer’s entire career lives in their lookbooks and a handful of magazine shoots, with nothing to place them in time, in conversation, in context.

If someone wants to understand a brand, what it represents, how it has evolved, what it stood for five years ago versus today, they find almost nothing. And when you find nothing, you conclude. You think this must not be serious enough. The absence of writing becomes a judgement on the thing itself.

Why It Matters

The appetite for this writing exists. Search for writing about Dior, and you find multiple voices, multiple interpretations, multiple entry points, critics disagreeing with each other, histories being written and rewritten, context building on context. Search for equivalent writing about any major Indian designer and you find almost nothing outside promotional coverage. Not because people don’t want to read it, but because almost nobody is writing it. And because nobody is writing it, the appetite doesn’t form publicly, and because the appetite isn’t visible, nobody feels the urgency to write. It is a loop, and it keeps going.

Indian fashion has a foundation. But the foundation was built without documentation, without criticism, without the kind of writing that turns an industry into a culture. A culture without a written record cannot fully know itself, cannot learn from its past, cannot argue about its present.

Fashion history does not belong only to designers. It belongs to everyone who engages with it — critics, editors, researchers, archivists, museums, people writing independently and the readers. Industries become cultures when enough people record, question, and argue about them. That work, for Indian fashion, is still largely waiting to be done. Perhaps this essay is one small attempt to build that record.

Support Fashion Interlude

Share Fashion Interlude

This whole June (my favourite month of the year) I went amidst the Himalayas — my hometown, Bageshwar, to live with my paternal grandparents. It’s a ritual in my family, ever since I was a kid and we moved to the city for better education and opportunities.

I had what people usually dream of when they imagine a life with no internet — total heaven, for me. My home is amidst the hills; even to reach the road, you have to walk. The sky is filled with stars (you can actually draw constellations), and there are green hills and forests, with animals like langurs, monkeys, leopards, deer, wild boars, and the list goes on. I’ve seen some of them, and heard the voices of others (grateful for just the voices, honestly).

Subscribe now

It was also an escape from the scorching heatwave back in the city, because there I was living under a blanket to survive the cold — which feels like a dream in summer.

Like a normal, delusional human, I also planned to make this vacation productive — daily exercise, reading, studying for my upcoming exams, learning a new skill, having fun. But again, I’m just a human, so I only really did the fun part: reading (most of my books happened this month) and resting. A lot. And I think a big reason for that is exactly the no-internet of it all — not that I didn’t want to use the internet, it’s that the internet didn’t want me to use it. So I naturally read more, and lived a little healthier (minus the posture, which took a hit from lying around most days).

Somewhere in all that reading and resting, this month is also when I came into this world (which I still don’t know is a good or bad thing), and the interesting part is that I just entered my 20s. Yeah, my teen years are gone, and I thought I’d feel a little different. Maybe my shoulders a little heavier with the aspirations of my 20s, proving myself, building the dream life. But the truth is, I didn’t feel anything.

Or maybe I did, just quietly. Instead of doing anything to mark it, I turned 20 in the hills with a book in my hand and no signal to tell anyone. And maybe that’s the whole point, that some things don’t need to be performed to matter. I read seven books instead of throwing myself a party, and it felt like exactly the right way to start a new decade.

Speaking of the books — here’s the quick rundown, before I get into the one that actually shaped this post.

Ever since starting university, I’ve been drawn to philosophy — my two main subjects, Psychology and Sociology, both come from it, and it made me want to know what philosophy actually is. So I’ve been reading chapters from different books and watching lectures when they catch my interest (it’s one of the subjects I’m trying to self-study).

I don’t really write about what I’m doing — whenever I try, I end up overthinking every sentence, second-guessing how much to share, and then not posting it at all. But this whole setup (the vacation, the books) is what actually shaped the ideals behind Fashion Interlude.

It started last summer, in a similarly quiet setup, when I watched a sustainability documentary I’d downloaded — The True Cost. It changed the way I thought about clothing entirely. I started thinking about labels, material, composition, and where things are actually made. An outfit stopped being just a bunch of clothes put together. It’s also when I first thought about writing about the people who make our clothes: the artisans.

Studying Psychology in my first year of university, I couldn’t help but notice how naturally the two things overlapped — how much of why we dress the way we do, buy what we buy, sits somewhere in the head, not just the wardrobe. Fashion psychology stopped being a random interest and became the place where my degree and my writing were quietly already meeting.

It changed how I shopped, too. I did my whole university wardrobe shopping trying to buy only natural fabrics, keeping a genuinely limited number of clothes that I rotate, making sure each piece has a longer shelf life. Surrounded by a university culture of buying clothes online, wearing them once for photos, and returning them — sticking to my shopping ethics is harder, honestly.

Subscribe now

But I come back to this publication, to why I started it, and to the fact that wearing something different every single day isn’t really necessary — it’s just consumption that capitalism has trained into us. I can’t afford sustainable brands. But I can make each choice a little more sustainable anyway.

That’s also when I thought about starting Fashion Interlude properly. I began with a self-hosted blog (the whole website setup), but the technical side, like images and SEO wasn’t really my thing, and it made writing feel harder than it needed to.

Early this year I moved to Substack, and I’ve loved it here. Not many people read yet, but the people who are here read thoughtfully and I get to read just as much as I write, which has expanded my own thinking more than I expected.

This June, I read two books that pushed that further. The first was Indian Fashion: Tradition, Style and Innovation by Arti Sandhu, which opened up real insight into how Indian clothing changed after Independence and during British rule. Insight you’ll see surface in future posts. I won’t pretend I understood everything in it; it was a genuinely hard read, and I think I’ll return to it once I know more of the terms and the broader evolution of Indian dress.

The other was Powder Room: The Untold Story of Indian Fashion by Shefalee Vasudev — I didn’t want it to end. Through interviews with models, designers, darzis (tailors), artisans and writers, it gave a real, layered look at how the industry actually works in India, and what she thinks the deeper problem is. And I think the biggest one is documentation: designers aren’t documented enough, there aren’t nearly enough writers covering collections, and often the only thing you can find about a show is who the showstopper was. That’s something I want to go deeper into in a future post.

More than anything, this book shaped how I want my own writing to feel — readable, easy to sit with, but with real depth. It doesn’t need to be fancy or hard to follow for people to take something from it.

All of this (last summer, this June, everything in between) is only a backdrop. It’s not everything (there’s more I’ll share as we go), but it’s shaped more of my life than I usually admit: the city I’m studying in, the subjects I chose, what I do with most of my free time. It matters more than I usually let on.

So, if you’ve read this far, here’s roughly where I’m taking this publication. I’ll be writing about Indian fashion weekly: designers, runways, industry questions, sometimes a deep dive into a single textile or handicraft. Alongside that, fashion essays on whatever’s interesting me at the time (I can’t fully pin down a niche for these yet — if you can, after reading a few, please tell me).

And every so often, something at the intersection of fashion and psychology. Indian fashion will be the main thread but the other side would be the fashion in a broader, less geography-bound sense.

That’s the plan, and it’ll keep evolving as we go. One more small thing, since we’re already being honest here — I pitched an idea to a magazine a while back, and after a lot of email back-and-forth and drafts, it got accepted (I’ll share it properly once the magazine is out — the magazine is soo cool, in the best way). I got paid for it, which is the first time I’ve ever been paid for anything in my life. Not a bad way to start my 20s.

Share

It’s also why I picked up that investing book, wanting to actually understand what to do with money, instead of just letting it sit around not knowing.

But money aside, this is the first time I’ve written this much about what’s actually in my head, apart from my journal, and it wasn’t easy to hit publish on. I try to post notes about what I’m thinking sometimes — mostly fashion, mostly writing but I usually end up overthinking every line until I’ve talked myself out of posting at all.

Maybe that’s just how I’m wired. I find it hard to connect with people I don’t know online, harder still in person, though I try — my comments are probably awkward as fuck, and very plain, but the exclamation marks are real. I mean them.

So I’m trying to put myself out here a little more. Build something like a community — people who think like me, and just as importantly, people who don’t (different perspectives are really important). I’m still experimenting, mostly in small ways nobody’s likely to notice. A phone wedged into a door handle at a slant. One outfit worn twice instead of once. Small things. But they’re there.

Support Fashion Interlude

Share Fashion Interlude

Image credits
Cover image: Photo by @alexdoroshina
All other photographs: Aditi Dhapola (my gallery)

Director: Neeraj Ghaywan

Writer: Ranjan Chandel, Neeraj Ghaywan, Suraj Majhi

Cast: Shefali Shah, Manish Chaudhari, Kiran Khoje

In Juice, the first thing you notice is not the story, but how uncomfortable the space feels. Set in a middle-class get-together, dim yellow lighting and poor ventilation make the house feel closed. Instead of relaxed, the space feels heavy with work and heat. This shows the main idea of the film: inequality here builds slowly over time. Through Manju (Shefali Shah), the film shows that patriarchy is not just a set of rules, but a condition of emotional dryness maintained by routine and indifference.

The film uses parallel sound to expose the hypocrisy of people. In the background, a TV debate discusses women’s empowerment and labels strong women “unlikable.” When one asks, “Do you have a problem with email, or female?” and the room erupts in laughter, they present their bias as practical thinking and using biology, weather, and traffic as logic to dismiss women’s capabilities, showing how empowerment stays only in discussion. When the table fan stops, Manju asks her husband to fix it. He agrees but never comes, showing how concern exists only in words, not in action. Here, women are not seen as equals, but through their work.

In the kitchen, women also reinforce these roles. They tell a young woman that independence only looks good “in English” and that motherhood is necessary. They also push a pregnant guest to agree with her husband and quit working, using Manju as an example. When Manju disagrees, everyone becomes silent, showing how difficult it is to question these ideas.

These ideas start from childhood. A boy casually dominates a girl during play, showing how these roles begin early. This is showed when a mother calls her daughter to serve plates. This hierarchy even fractures the women in the kitchen; the pregnant guest, is the one who offers the maid a broken steel glass for her tea. It shows how power operates in layers. When the maid refuses the broken glass, it creates the first crack.

As demands from the living room increase, the physical environment of the kitchen reaches a literal and metaphorical boiling point. The chicken begins to burn and stick to the kadhai, shows how much pressure has built up. Manju finally stopped. Even the dry, overcooked food reflects her exhaustion. When her husband calls for more service without looking at her, the internal pressure finally matches the external heat. She simply stops. In this silence, the routine finally breaks.

The film does not promise any big change. Instead, we are left with Manju pulling a chair and drinking juice. In any other context, this would be unnoticeable but here it feels powerful yet in Juice, it feels like a powerful moment. Even something as simple as sitting becomes difficult. The husband’s clenched teeth and sigh suggest a recognition of this shift, but the unfallen tears show the exhaustion behind it. By ending in silence rather than a shout, the film holds up a mirror to a reality where a woman taking her “share of the air” is a strong act of resistance.

Subscribe now

At its core, it reflects a decision to keep and tend rather than discard — a practice that is increasingly being framed as a conscious one. With the whole world trying to live slowly and consciously, the idea of extending the life of your clothes has grown alongside it. The slow living movement has shifted how we value garments, inviting a slower rhythm of consumption that prizes repair, resale, and thrift.

This turn toward repairing and mending is showing up in several different forms across the industry. Designers are pulling from various regional textile traditions to ground their collections, whether it is the heavy patchwork seen in Western workwear trends or the precise, geometric darning styles coming out of East Asian design. Each region has its own way of handling worn fabric, and the one I am specifically interested in is the method from the Indian subcontinent — Kantha.

Subscribe now

At its core, Kantha is a material born out of the necessity to stretch the life cycle of a textile, relying on repetition rather than complexity. With its history spanning thousands of years and originating in the Bengal region — encompassing both West Bengal and Bangladesh it was a craft maintained by women for use inside the household, created for functional family needs rather than commercial exchange or public display.

The sarees that were worn out are layered together and bound using rows of simple running stitches. Because the raw materials relied entirely on whatever clothing happened to be at hand, no two finished pieces could ever be identical. The resulting textile is defined by its physical variations. And it is not just the physical variation that makes it different — it is the story of the woman who is making it.

With one piece sometimes taking over a year to complete, it absorbs a year’s worth of stories, emotions, and feelings from its maker. It carries emotional weight; expectant mothers would spend the final months of their pregnancy stitching soft bedding for their newborns, believed to bring good fortune. Kantha was not a singular textile format but a versatile language adopted for different uses in the home. Women constructed everything from the archilata (mirror covers) to wrappers for clothing storage to the galicha (layered floor rugs).

What began as a domestic necessity now appears as a design philosophy. The qualities that once emerged from material scarcity — repair, longevity, visible signs of use are increasingly being framed as conscious choices within contemporary fashion. That shift moves the technique from the home into the atelier, from material need into aesthetic intention. It is a slow, structural approach to design that moves away from the logic of mass-produced goods.

Share

Fashion's interest in Kantha is therefore not only about the technique itself, but about the values it appears to embody. The result is that Kantha is now visible at a scale and in spaces its original makers could not have imagined. It appears across fashion in markedly different ways, moving between craft preservation, luxury, and commercial design.

When Natasha Poonawalla wore a custom ivory muga silk saree by Arpita Mehta at a gala in New York, intricately hand-embroidered with Kantha— the craft was being seen not as heritage costume but as contemporary luxury. From Anavila applying it into everyday pieces to Pero by Aneeth Arora using it to make layered garments, Indian designers have long understood how to carry the technique forward.

Tarun Tahiliani brought it into his summer/resort 2013 collection, giving it a high-fashion context. And internationally, Burberry Prorsum referenced Kantha in their Fall/Winter 2015 collection, “Patchwork, Patterns and Prints.” Weavers Studio by Darshan Shah has been using Kantha as a framework for employing women since 1993. The contexts may differ, but together they point to the same thing: Kantha is no longer confined to the domestic spaces where it began.

This whole Kantha revival has a bigger picture in it. For decades, the global fashion industry operated on mass production, flooding the market with garments designed to be worn a handful of times and discarded. This didn’t just create physical waste; it broke the personal relationship people had with their clothes. It stripped away the intimacy.

And as more and more people are realising it, so does the industry.

Now, the industry is experiencing a wave of collective nostalgia, with a rise in archival fashion and vintage revivals. Designers and consumers are all looking backwards, attempting to undo the damage done by over-industrialisation by reaching for the garments and techniques that required the human hand and carried a sense of storytelling.

This is where the global fascination with visible mending, slow design, and long-standing textile traditions is finding its purpose again. Fashion and the people consuming it are now trying to show that they care for their clothes — that they are not something to be discarded, but should hold greater meaning.

Share Fashion Interlude

Reference:

https://bbc.com/culture/article/20221020-the-stories-hidden-in-the-ancient-indian-craft-of-kantha

That’s not because you’re unoriginal. Style has always been shaped by outside forces. The people around us, the clothes available to us, the trends of a particular moment, the figures we admire, the media we consume, each leaves its mark. Long before algorithms began curating our feeds, influence was already finding its way into our wardrobes.

The problem is that influence can become so familiar that we stop recognising it as influence at all. A preference repeated often enough starts to feel like a personal choice. An aesthetic encountered everywhere begins to feel like common sense. Over time, it becomes difficult to separate what genuinely resonates with us from what simply becomes familiar.

Subscribe now

Before we can develop a style that feels more personal, we first need to understand where all that noise is coming from.

Where It All Comes From

To understand how to quiet the noise, we first have to recognise that it’s not a single thing controlling our choices.

The first and most visible layer is digital flattening. The algorithm, the constant suggestions, the information at the palm of your hand. You now know how people dress from Kyoto to Spain. The more data we have, the more easily it gets into us. When we see the same silhouettes, colours, styling tricks, and trend cycles often enough, they stop feeling like trends and start feeling like taste.

Your social environment growing up. The city, the school, the family, the codes and uniforms of the places you were in. If you grew up somewhere that expected you to dress a particular way, you didn’t get time to develop your own style — the style just came in the backseat. This layer feels like a default rather than an influence. It feels like you’re just supposed to dress that way. Even after those rules disappear, their influence often remains because what once felt expected now feels natural.

Then there’s the layer of people you admired, not influencers, but real people. A friend, an older cousin, someone you wanted to be around. You started dressing toward them slowly, without noticing. You didn’t just want their clothes. You wanted to be like them, even a little. Sometimes we borrow style before we realise we’re borrowing identity. Even if you couldn’t have their life, you could have the clothes.

One of the most important and least talked about is the economic one. Taste requires more than creativity. If the things you love are expensive, or you can’t afford to experiment often, your style becomes more about survival than expression. Your preferences and options become limited, and the smartest choice available is buying what’s available rather than what you want, or defaulting to a capsule that’s more about practicality than identity. A lot of what feels like personal preference is actually just the ceiling you were given. The wardrobe we build is often a negotiation between taste and circumstance.

Subscribe now

And then there’s validation. Maybe you wore something once, it got compliments, and you kept returning to it, not because it was particularly you, but because it worked socially. Or maybe the people you’re close to prefer a certain look, and slowly, to fit in, you started dressing more like them. Over time, the outfit that gets rewarded starts to feel safer than the one that feels most like you.

The Real Problem

None of these influences is inherently bad. The problem is that they rarely arrive one at a time. They overlap, reinforce one another, and become so familiar that we stop noticing them altogether.

A trend repeated often enough starts to feel like a taste. A habit starts to feel like identity. And eventually, what feels personal may simply be what you’ve never stopped to question.

If you feel completely at home in your style, if you don’t feel like a stranger in your own clothes, then there may be nothing to fix here. This is mostly for people who have the quiet sense that something else is steering the wheel.

The goal isn’t to eliminate influence entirely— that’s impossible, and not particularly interesting. We live among other people, shared aesthetics, and beautiful things. The goal is simply to know which parts are yours and which parts you accepted without thinking.

Even if you love the way you dress, it’s worth knowing why. If you’ve worn skirts for as long as you can remember and someone asks why, do you have an answer?

Questions Worth Asking Yourself

Before trying to change anything, it’s worth getting curious about the style you already have. You don’t need to answer every question. It might help you get a broad idea about your style.

• What are the pieces I wear most often, and why do I keep reaching for them?

• What items felt exciting to buy but are rarely worn?

• Who or what has influenced my style the most?

• Would I still wear this if nobody complimented it?

• What do I wear when I want to feel most like myself?

• If someone asked why I dress the way I do, what would I say?

Share

How to Start

What you actually wear versus what you only bought

Your wardrobe usually has two categories: the pieces you repeatedly reach for, and the pieces that felt right when you bought them but rarely get worn. It shows the difference between what fits into your life and what only fits into a moment.

Before someone reacts

Some clothes feel right the moment you put them on. Others only feel right once someone notices them. The pieces that feel good before anyone else sees them are often closer to your genuine preferences. The ones that rely on a compliment may be serving a different purpose.

Subtract before you add.

Most style advice tells you to find more references. But sometimes the better move is to step away from them for a while. Open your wardrobe before opening Pinterest. Build an outfit before looking at TikTok. Even a small gap between yourself and outside input can reveal what you naturally reach for. If a piece can’t survive the noise before you buy it, it won’t survive in your wardrobe either.

What you loved before you knew

A colour, a texture, a silhouette, a detail. Something you loved before you knew what was trendy or tasteful. Revisit those things. Then look at what you’re wearing now and ask why. The goal isn’t nostalgia. It’s finding the preferences that survived trends, approval, and changing tastes.

Inspiration VS Imitation

Inspiration stays with you. Imitation usually disappears once the image is gone.

A useful test: if you’re still thinking about a piece, an outfit, or an idea a few days later without having to look at it repeatedly, it’s probably inspiration. If the desire disappears the moment you close the app, it was probably imitation.

Where This Leaves You

With all of this, you still won’t arrive at a style completely free of influence — and that’s not actually what we want. The goal is a smaller gap between what you wear and what you’d choose if nobody was watching, nothing was being suggested, and nothing was on sale.

Original style isn’t a destination you reach and stay at. It moves. It evolves. It takes things from your life. But the practice underneath it stays the same: paying attention, asking questions, and getting a little more honest about your answers.

Because the point isn’t to remove every outside voice. The point is to recognise your own among them. It’s finding the music between the various voices.

Share Fashion Interlude

Diya Joukani — the cool girl from Mumbai who turned the city into her runway. Frank Ocean on the beat, vendors leaning in, rickshaws pausing mid-street — the everyday suddenly staged, the chaos of the megacity made desirable.

But the setting is only half the story. The clothes do the other half. Modern silhouettes sewn with traditional craft, making the work palatable for both the lover of ethnic dressing and the fan of western minimalism. The formula works. The question is where it goes from here.

THE CLOTHES

An embroidered hoodie in her hands reads like a deliberate contradiction: heavy zardozi and aari work layered over everyday sweatshirt fabric. Up close, dense metallic threads and tiny sequins are stitched into floral and geometric motifs.

The silhouette stays casual: dropped shoulders, baggy fit, oversized hood, but the ornamentation is not decoration. It changes the energy of the garment. It takes the lazy look and makes it energetic, considered.

Subscribe now

On denim, the same techniques appear across pockets, knees, and cuffs. The colour palette holds the same logic, mostly solid neutrals punctuated with oxblood and turmeric tones. Modern, grounded, city-ready.

Streetwear and traditional craft have crossed over before, but hers feels fresh, perhaps because the reels and city staging make the combination feel less ceremonial and more immediate. The two do not compete here. They sharpen each other.

THE CITY

To understand why it lands the way it does, you have to look at where it comes from. Her references are not abstract concepts or poetic metaphors — they are visual, immediate, and entirely local.

After watching a Dahi Handi celebration, the human pyramids, crowd, and energy of a pot breaking overhead moved straight onto fabric as graphic work. Street wall art, local textures, the everyday friction of the city: all of it becomes raw material.

By channelling the loudness and organised chaos of Mumbai into traditional hand embroidery like aari and zardozi, her clothes stop being garments and start feeling like an extension of the city itself.

The street does not just inspire her work. It lives inside it.

THE RISE

Understanding Diya Joukani as a designer means looking past the digital noise. The reality is that she is still remarkably new to the industry. The body of work is small. Her rise was not built on decades of collections, but on a highly successful online format that brought her and her clothes directly to the world.

Her foundation is self-taught and street-learned: pattern-making from YouTube, time spent with a Masterji in Bandra who sharpened her skills in construction and craft. No fashion school. But she grew up surrounded by personal style — a well-dressed Sindhi family and an aunt who worked as a designer. That upbringing shows in everything she makes.

Share

That ordering matters. The audience came fast, built on content, on reels, on a format that worked, and it brought her into exclusive spaces like Instagram’s Met Gala creator watch party. But it has also brought her to the crossroads that every viral creative eventually faces: how do you convert attention into longevity?

THE QUESTION

Right now, Joukani is the cool girl of the movement. But internet trends are short-lived by design, and the fashion industry has seen enough viral moments come and go to know that attention is not the same as legacy.

For DIYADIYA to move from viral sensation to a permanent address in this industry, the work has to evolve beyond content. The design itself needs to deepen — new silhouettes, harder technical challenges, a point of view that can hold its ground outside of a reel. From cool girl to cool designer, the hype now has to prove it was worth it.

Share Fashion Interlude

Nobody talks about that part.

Maybe call it a wardrobe hangover: the excitement of finally dressing for yourself colliding with the reality of being seen by people who had already decided who you were.

The Hard Part Isn’t What You Think It Is

We’re told the hardest part is deciding to change. Finding the style, working up the nerve, making the shift —that’s where the courage lives. After that, the story goes, it gets easier.

Subscribe now

What nobody prepares you for is what comes after.

There are actually two completely different kinds of discomfort here, and people only ever talk about the first one. Anticipatory discomfort is loud. It is the adrenaline of what if they love it, what if they hate it, what if this is actually me. It keeps you moving.

Post-change discomfort is quieter. It arrives after the excitement wears off, when you are standing in the outfit and now have to hold it in the actual world with people who already know you. Nobody mentions this part because it does not make for a satisfying story. But it is where most people quietly fold.

When People Need You to Stay the Same

Here’s the thing about the people closest to you: they aren’t really reacting to what you’re wearing.

We dress in stages — as children, our parents dress us, then friends and environment take over, then work and social codes. There are always forces shaping what we wear, and the people around us become part of that gravity without realising it. They hold a version of us in their heads and quietly expect it to continue.

That version is load-bearing — not for you, but for them. When you change, their image of you has to update, and that quiet update feels somewhere under the surface like a small threat to their own sense of stability. We rely on people staying familiar so we can feel stable ourselves. When someone shifts, it quietly unsettles everyone else.

So when your closest people react with friction, it’s not always criticism. It’s disorientation. They’re not against the new you; they’re just not ready for the person they’d counted on to stay the same to have become someone slightly different.

Even when they were the ones who told you to be yourself. That’s the particular sting of it. They encouraged you. They said be you, express yourself, we’ll support you. And then you did, and they looked at you like that, and said you look... different. Not mean. Not warm. Just different. And that one word carried the whole weight of every expectation they’d quietly built around who you were supposed to be.

After coming to university, my style changed: more accessories, more intention, less of the clean simplicity I used to wear. When I showed up home like that, my family’s response was gentle but clear: You looked better before. It was never really about the accessories. It was about the fact that I’d been away, and changed, and was maybe going to keep changing.

Showing this version of myself to my parents is still the hardest thing. So sometimes I do not. When I go home, I go back to the older version. Not because I do not believe in the new one, but because I do not always have the energy to hold both the outfit and the explanation at the same time.

Why You Start Doubting Yourself

It is not just the direct comments. It is the repeated noticing. Someone mentioned it twice. Then again. Something that started as an observation slowly begins to feel like a problem being flagged.

Social groups like friends, families, and colleagues have an unconscious pull toward keeping their members consistent. Not out of malice. More like self-preservation. When one person shifts, the group’s rhythm shifts, and the group responds by trying to pull the member back into the familiar pattern.

But you don’t need the term to recognise the feeling — it’s the pressure of a hundred small signals all pointing in the same direction: be who you were again.

Because it doesn’t come from outside — it seeps in. And it’s very good at working.

The clothes feel right when you’re alone. The minute they’re in contact with real-life, real people who have history with you, expectations of you — meaning shifts. You start wondering if the clarity you felt was real, or just the freedom of nobody watching. You can’t explain this to anyone without sounding like you’re complaining about having done the brave thing you said you wanted.

Subscribe now

So you sit with it quietly. Your brain gets caught between something feeling right and something feeling hard, and starts treating both as the same signal. This is cognitive dissonance doing its worst — growth and regret can feel identical from the inside. So your brain tells you: reconsider.

That’s the loneliest part. Because you found the thing, and now you’re alone with the doubt.

What Going Back Actually Costs

Let’s be honest — retreating works. The friction disappears. The people around you relax. The version they knew comes back, and so does the ease of being known the way you used to be known.

But going back after you’ve already found something is different from never having tried. You can’t unknow what you found. That knowledge doesn’t disappear — it either becomes a quiet wondering (what would have happened if I’d stayed with it) or it sits there until you try again. Going back isn’t an erasure. It’s a deferral, and you know it, and that’s its own weight to carry.

The cost of staying changed is different. It's just slower. The slow work of letting people adjust their image of you, the patience of letting people update their image of you. The repeated act of showing up as yourself until the comments stop and the new version becomes natural.

When the New Version Stops Feeling New

At some point — not in one moment, but across a series of small ones — the source of the discomfort quietly moves.

It stops being mostly about their reactions and starts being mostly about your own hesitation. You notice you’ve stopped wanting to change before you leave the house. You start feeling something closer to mild impatience, waiting for people to catch up. This is the moment the new version stops feeling borrowed. Not a dramatic arrival, but the new self quietly stopping feeling like a costume you’re justifying, and starting to feel like ground you’re standing on.

Some people do update — slowly, without making a thing of it, until one day they’re not mentioning the clothes anymore, which means it’s just how you look now. That quiet shift, when it happens, is worth paying attention to.

Some people don’t update. And eventually, you stop needing them to.

Nobody tells you that dressing for yourself is not something you unlock once. You keep choosing it, especially in front of people who already had expectations.

The discomfort after the change does not prove you did it wrong. It is proof that the change was real.

Share Fashion Interlude

Then John Galliano announced a collaboration with Zara. And suddenly the myth looked thinner. Why would one of fashion’s most storied designers cross into fast fashion? It made me start questioning the premise entirely.

Are luxury brands really above trends at all?

Do the longer, slower movements in culture not touch what they design? Fashion is not just art — it is one of the heaviest industries in capitalism, with the apparel market valued at $1.84 trillion in 2025. At that scale, the idea that any player is fully above market forces starts to feel more like mythology than fact.

So do luxury brands really not chase trends at all?

What We Actually Mean by “Trend”

Before unpacking this, the terminology needs to be clear because “trend” gets used to mean very different things, and conflating them is where most of this conversation goes wrong.

Subscribe now

Microtrends are short bursts: two to twelve weeks, driven by viral social media. Barbiecore in 2023. Mob wife aesthetic in 2024. They ignite fast through celebrities, influencers, or viral moments, and burn out just as quickly. They fuel impulse buying in fast fashion and are forgotten almost as soon as they arrive.

Macrotrends move more slowly— two to ten years and reshape broader aesthetics without anyone quite noticing the shift while it’s happening. The move from skinny jeans to relaxed and baggy silhouettes is one example. These usually emerge from broader changes in lifestyle, technology, and culture, and they affect what almost everyone wears.

Deeper still are cultural shifts, playing out over decades. Gender fluidity in clothing. Sustainability is reshaping which fabrics are even considered acceptable. These are not driven by an algorithm; they move on their own terms, and eventually reshape the industry whether brands intend it or not.

Trends are layered, each on a different timeline. The confusion begins when all three get flattened into the same word.

What Luxury Actually Does

Luxury doesn’t just react to cultural shifts; it positions itself to curate them.

A house at this level is constantly reading: trend reports, search data, store behaviour, social signals, what’s surfacing from subcultures before it reaches the mainstream. They watch what is quietly gathering energy, long before it has a name.

From there, they decide not just which directions to acknowledge but how — through runway looks, controlled editorials, collaborations, and who they dress and appoint as brand ambassadors.

That last part matters more than it looks. An ambassador wearing something specific turns it into a talking point, and a talking point becomes a demand.

Once a direction is identified, luxury houses run it through a filter: Does this align with our identity? Does it work with our previous collections? Does it fit the designer’s voice?

Subscribe now

The answers determine whether a house ignores, adapts, amplifies, or inverts what’s happening around it.

One consistent pattern is waiting for a shift to mature before touching it — letting a direction settle long enough to know whether it has real staying power, and only then building something around it.

Gucci under Alessandro Michele is a clear example of how this works at the deepest level. Gender fluidity in fashion had already been building for decades, but Michele made it central to the house rather than a footnote. Female models wore pieces from the men’s collections and vice versa. He eventually formalised it into MX Project, an official genderless line, with the stated aim of emphasising the dissolving lines of the gender divide.

But the more visible expression of it was in who the house chose to represent them and how those people showed up. Ambassadors like Harry Styles and BTS’s Jin were seen carrying Gucci bags and wearing accessories from the womenswear line as a natural extension of how they dressed.

That is deliberate. When someone with that reach carries a woman’s bag, and it reads as effortless rather than provocative, the brand has done its job quietly. Michele didn’t invent gender fluidity. He read where the culture was already going and placed Gucci at the front of it, in the house’s own language.

Why It Doesn’t Look Like Trend-Following

Luxury’s engagement with cultural shifts is necessary, not shameful. Markets change, younger audiences grow up with different expectations, and what felt aspirational a decade ago isn’t automatically aspirational now. A brand that ignores this entirely becomes a museum. The difference is that luxury rarely says it is responding, but it frames every move as evolution.

Part of how it does this is by covering its tracks carefully. If a quieter, more understated aesthetic starts gaining ground, a luxury house doesn’t announce it’s leaning into minimalism. It reissues archive pieces. It uses language like heritage, enduring codes, and the house’s founding principles. Nothing is chased; everything is recalled. When quiet luxury was at its peak, the visible response from several houses was a wave of archive reissues — it looked like restraint, not reaction.

Share

The time lag helps too. A look at the runway takes months to reach the store. In that window, fast fashion has already made and sold its version. By the time the luxury piece arrives, the shift has already bloomed and wilted everywhere else, which lets the house position itself as ahead, as though it chose the direction rather than tracked it. What reads as a trend on the high street becomes “timeless” at the luxury level.

This is also where something like Virgil Abloh’s appointment at Louis Vuitton becomes interesting to look at. By the time LV brought him in as men’s artistic director, streetwear had already proven it wasn’t going anywhere — it had moved from subculture to mainstream to cultural default for an entire generation.

What Abloh did wasn’t follow that shift. His debut show sent models down a rainbow runway in tailored suits alongside utility vests, with footwear that nodded to sneaker culture but carried LV codes throughout. It didn’t look like a luxury brand catching up to streetwear. It looked like streetwear was finally having a luxury vocabulary. The framing mattered as much as the clothes.

They also borrow energy rather than form. Better materials, quieter branding, more considered construction, and a different storytelling lift an idea without copying the surface version of it. Trend-responsive pieces tend to live at the edges of a collection rather than the centre: capsule collaborations, limited runs that are present but not defining.

So it is more accurate to say luxury dances with trends than chases them.

So, Are They Above It All?

Not quite, but chasing doesn’t fit either.

Luxury doesn’t chase trends the way fast fashion does. But it watches closely how taste shifts, how audiences move, how culture changes beneath the surface, and then edits, reframes, and rebuilds those signals into something that feels like a natural extension of the house by the time it reaches anyone.

When people say luxury brands don’t chase trends, they’re not wrong. But they’re not entirely right either. The more accurate version is this: luxury doesn’t behave like a brand reacting overnight to something viral. Luxury doesn’t avoid trends. It absorbs them slowly enough that they stop looking like trends by the time they reach the runway.

Share Fashion Interlude

Then he lands in Corsica, where nobody knows his name or his job or his family, and we can see the change through his clothes — relaxed shirt, loose jeans, easy, careless dressing that only shows up when someone stops carrying the weight of being known.

We have always been told that if you want to find yourself, go somewhere alone and unknown. But what actually changes when you get there — the city, or you?

No stares from people who remember last year’s version of you. Just you, a stranger city, and if you pay attention, a slightly different version of yourself showing up in the mirror.

That shift is usually small. It doesn’t happen all at once, and it doesn’t happen to everyone in the same way. But it happens. And the place it shows up most literally, is in what you choose to wear. What comes out in those moments is usually what gets called personal style. Because in those moments, your choices stop passing through everyone else's expectations first.

This post is about why that gap exists. Why what you wear when you’re known and what you wear when you’re a stranger are often two different things — and what that difference is actually telling you.

The Version They Expect

When people know you, they carry a version of you in their heads. Built from years of seeing you in context. Your clothes either confirm that snapshot or disturb it, and disturbing it has a cost.

Subscribe now

Show up differently — not dramatic, but simple small changes, and you’ll feel it. Something flickers across their face. “You’ve changed.” It rarely feels like a compliment.

It arrives like a small accusation, like stepping out of line you didn’t know you’d agreed to stand in. So you don’t. You keep dressing in a way that keeps the questions away. Not because you consciously decided to it, it’s just you stop reaching for the things that would require an explanation.

This is what the sociologist Erving Goffman meant when he described everyday life as performance. Not that we’re being fake, but that we’re always managing how we’re read — adjusting ourselves to the audience in the room.

And after years of this, the performance starts feeling natural. It just starts to feel like who you are.

Which is where it gets worth examining. Because there’s a difference between dressing as social performance: adjusting your appearance to meet expectations, avoiding friction, holding relationships steady and dressing as aesthetic expression, where what you put on comes from your own instincts rather than someone else's expectations.

Most of us live closer to the performance end than we think, and we’d never know it, because we never step outside the audience long enough to notice.

The Stranger City

This is what changes when no one knows you. Three things loosen at once: the social memory people carry of you, the relational stakes that come with confusing or disappointing them, and the fixed image of you that others have been quietly using as a reference. The stranger on the street has no yesterday-you to compare against. To them, you are just this — whatever you walked in wearing.

When you’re known, you’re legible. People decode what you’re wearing through who they already think you are. A new jacket on someone familiar reads as a statement. The same jacket on a stranger is just a jacket.

What anonymity removes isn’t judgment — strangers judge too. It removes continuity. A stranger doesn’t know who you were last month, what you usually wear, or who you’re expected to be.

Psychologists would call what’s happening here a collapse of self-discrepancy — the gap between your actual self (the daily, context-adjusted version), your ideal self (the one you’d be if you stopped editing), and your ought self (the version others have come to expect).

In regular life, those three are in constant negotiation, and the ought self usually wins quietly. In a city where nobody knows your name, the ought self has no ground to stand on. The ideal self finally gets some room.

That’s why the risk feels so much lower among strangers — a bad outfit just dissolves into the crowd, unremembered, consequenceless.

And it’s also why some people find anonymity untethering rather than freeing. If your sense of self is partly built from being seen in a particular way by particular people, removing that context doesn’t feel like liberation. It feels like losing your footing.

Both responses are honest. Both responses reveal the same thing: how much of the way you present yourself is actually shaped by who’s standing in the room.

How Personal Is Personal Style?

All of which leads somewhere uncomfortable: if your style shifts that noticeably when you’re unknown, how much of what you call your style is actually yours?

We all build relational wardrobes without realising it. There’s the version of yourself you dress as for family, for work, for different friend groups, and for an evening alone.

Clothes functions as signal, and who holds the key to reading them depends entirely on the audience. Among people who know you, your outfit is decoded through their knowledge of you. It gets filtered through what they expect.

Among strangers, it’s just texture and impression, no context attached. This is why the same outfit can feel like a risk at home and feel like nothing at all somewhere new.

Maybe this is why Freud's model still feels relevant here: the Id wants to wear what it wants, no apology, no filter. The Superego dresses for the room, for the role, for the expectation. And the Ego — the part that actually gets you dressed every morning is running negotiations between them.

Your wardrobe becomes the result of that negotiation and who’s in the room to see it.

Share

We romanticize the idea of one true personal style — a singular, consistent expression of a singular self. But style doesn’t work that way, and neither do people. It’s not a destination. It’s an ongoing negotiation with your surroundings, and the surroundings change.

The Gap

So here’s the thing to sit with: imagine you’re moving to a new city tomorrow where nobody knows you. What would you wear?

The distance between those instincts and what you actually wear most mornings is the gap this whole post has been circling.

It’s not just a style gap. It’s a measure of how much energy you spend constantly managing the image others have of you. Being a stranger costs almost nothing.

Maintaining a consistent self for people who think they already know you takes ongoing, invisible work and most of us have been doing it so long we stopped noticing.

If your answer to that exercise surprises you, it’s worth asking why. It might just be something you’ve been curious about but haven’t let yourself try. It might be something you’ve been actively suppressing because changing would mean answering for it.

Among strangers, you rarely owe anyone an explanation for what you’re wearing. Back home, one different outfit can feel like a statement you have to justify to people who have fifteen years of context and a fixed idea of who you are.

What You’re Left With

We’ve spent this whole time talking about the stranger city, but the stranger city isn’t really the point. The point is that most of us have gotten very comfortable living as an edited version of ourselves — edited across so many small negotiations, that the edited version started to feel like the original.

We think our style is our own. But there’s a thumb on the scale, and the thumb belongs to everyone who thinks they already know us.

The anonymous moments: the solo trip, the empty house morning, the city where you’re nobody yet isn’t an escape from real life. It’s more like a gap in the noise, where you can briefly hear what you’d choose if nobody else was part of the decision.

What comes out in that gap isn't a different or unique self. It’s just a less-negotiated one.

Share Fashion Interlude

2026 is not that story anymore, because while scrolling, I find that now people are talking about the looks worn by Indian houses and Indian celebrities. Have the looks changed and become better than before, or have people become more interested in them? Probably both, and this year gave a good enough reason for either answer.

The theme this year was Fashion Is Art. Here is every Indian who attended, and what they brought to that brief.

Karan Johar

I would start with Karan Johar for the first look, as he is the one who impressed me the most. I have always seen the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma in books and posters, and seeing them translated into clothes — honestly, I never saw it coming.

Karan Johar made his Met Gala debut tonight, and for me, he is the best-dressed man on that carpet. His look, designed by Manish Malhotra, brings the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma to life. Hand-painted motifs, zardozi embroidery, architectural references to pillars, lotuses, and swans across a dramatic cape worn over a vintage-styled bandhgala.

Subscribe now

The look took over 5,600 hours to complete, with 80 artisans working on it. Karan titled his note about the look Framed In Eternity, writing that Varma "painted feelings" and that this is what he has always tried to do in cinema. The cape is a moving canvas.

Manish Malhotra

And then there is the man who made that cape. Manish Malhotra wore his own atelier to the Met Gala — an architectural cape over a bandhgala, with the cape as the clear centre of attention. But it was not just architectural. It carried the signatures of the artisans who made it, stitched directly into the fabric, giving homage to the people who work behind the scenes.

The cape brought the whole city of Mumbai with it — the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the Gateway of India, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, alongside references to trains, taxis, and the everyday life of the people in the city. It was crafted over 960 hours with more than 50 artisans, using techniques central to Indian textile and craft — dori, zardozi, chikankari, and kasab.

In the cape, you could see a tailor at his machine, and an embroiderer mid-motion with thread suspended between his fingers. Malhotra, known for designing some of the most significant outfits in Indian cinema, brought the theatre and the story through his clothes to the Met. His look, apart from being art, is also a tribute to the people who make the art possible.

Isha Ambani

After seeing her pre-party look, which had featured 26 distinct borders from different regions of India, highlighting the artisan heritage, I thought she would not wear a saree this time and would go with a more western silhouette. She did not, and she was right.

Isha Ambani brought something sentimental and staggering to the carpet. A custom Gaurav Gupta saree woven from pure gold threads by artisans at Swadesh, inspired by ancient Indian frescoes, with hand-painted pichwai-style motifs along the border. Her blouse alone was adorned with over 1,800 carats of diamonds, emeralds, polki and kundan stones from her mother Nita Ambani’s personal collection, including a historic Sarpech piece once part of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s collection. 50 artisans worked for more than 1,200 hours.

Indian embroidery is now mostly measured by the time taken to make it, and it shows how much human hand is in each piece, and how each look is one of a kind. Even if someone tried to recreate it, the emotions while making it and the person wearing it would never be the same.

The saree was not the only thing she adorned that night. A Mango sculpture by Subodh Gupta was carried alongside, and I will be honest — I thought for a second, is this a reference to Indians consuming 40% of the world’s mangoes themselves? We do love mangoes, and there is nothing wrong with bringing that love to the carpet.

But the mango is not just a mango. It is a sculpture, and the flowers in her hair look like real jasmine but are sculptural too. The whole look was grounded in family heirlooms and Indian art used as fashion. It is not just another saree at another Met Gala. It earns the theme.

Sudha Reddy

Sudha Reddy also wore a custom Manish Malhotra look, but rooted in an entirely different tradition. Her look was built around the Machilipatnam style of Kalamkari, one of India’s oldest art forms. Central to the design was the Tree of Life motif, which symbolises balance and interconnectedness.

Created over 3,459 hours by more than 90 artisans, the outfit brought together zardozi, marodi, resham, and detailed metalwork. The motifs in the cape featured regional symbols like the Palapitta and Jammi Chettu alongside Kalpavriksha, Surya and Chandra, all reflecting her connection with Telangana.

With her look, she tried to showcase Indian heritage through a cinematic lens, telling the story of her culture through the clothes. It is a look that would take time to understand fully — there are so many details and meanings behind every motif that a single glance does not do it justice.

Diya Mehta Jatia

Diya Mehta Jatia arrived in a Mayyur Girotra creation that stopped me completely. Her outfit brings two distinct and different art forms together in a powerful blend of traditional technique and modern dressing.

The dress is made from shola, a craft form native to West Bengal, where the pith of a water-based plant is carved and shaped into sculptural forms — and no, it is not marble. Laid over a Kanjeevaram silk base, the whole look reads as an ivory sculpture first and a dress second. Shola work has lived for centuries in wedding processions and religious ceremonies. Here it is on the steps of the Met, doing exactly what the theme asked for.

Mona Patel

Mona Patel wore a custom look by Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda inspired by Leonardo da Vinci — specifically by the proportions and philosophy of the Vitruvian Man. The ensemble was conceived as two interdependent movements. The outer cape, titled the Veil of Genius, was designed to look like a drifting manuscript in motion, made from silk and featuring prints inspired by da Vinci’s original sketches.

Underneath, titled the Anatomy of Genius, was an ivory sculptural gown with hand-pleated chiffon engineered to suggest muscle and fascia, a hand-sewn spine in silk, circulatory vessels in gold tubogas, and neural synapses as diamonds down the sleeves. The look is the blend of the human body and art, which is exactly what this theme was asking for.

Subscribe now

According to Vogue, Mona went to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, a historic library in Milan, to study da Vinci’s original manuscripts for the authenticity of the look which could be felt in her ensemble.

Natasha Poonawalla

Natasha Poonawalla stepped out wearing a sculpture by Marc Quinn paired with a custom couture ensemble by Dolce & Gabbana. The look was built around a bold floral concept — a large white structure shaped like the petals of a moth orchid framing her body, with the centre of the outfit resembling the inside of the flower.

The white felt was considered, a nod to peace against a world that is not offering much of it right now, contrasting with the fluid white gown that gave the whole look a breathable feeling alongside the stiffness of the sculpture. As one of the regulars at the Met, she never disappoints and always pushes the boundary with her fashion choices.

Princess Gauravi Kumari and Sawai Padmanabh Singh

Princess Gauravi Kumari wore Prabal Gurung — a gown reimagined from the vintage chiffon saree of her grandmother, Maharani Gayatri Devi. The colour pink is an ode to Jaipur, the Pink City. The pearls are an ode to Gayatri Devi, who was known for her chiffon sarees and pearls. Every single element of this look has a reason and a story behind it. It is not art in the grander sense, but more like a tribute to her grandmother and one of the most famous royal beauty icons India has produced.

Sawai Padmanabh Singh also wore Prabal, in a velvet Phulgar coat over traditional silhouettes, with zardozi and zari embroidery and a full mirrored sun on the back, a nod to his Suryavanshi lineage. The coat took over 600 hours to complete. The shoes were made by the same craftsman who has worked for their household for over 50 years, and he completed his look with jadau and polki necklaces associated with Jaipur’s Johri Bazaar. His look is not just an ode to a culture but an applause for the people who keep it alive.

Both siblings spotlighted Rajasthani craftsmanship on the global stage, and they did it without explaining it. It was just there, entirely itself.

Ananya Birla

Ananya Birla made her debut in a structured black couture outfit by Robert Wun — a voluminous skirt with a cinched blazer-style bodice, paired with a metallic sculptural mask by artist Subodh Gupta, made from kitchen utensils. It is the modern look from an Indian at the Met Gala, instead of going the traditional route. I need to get my hands on that mask, and I already know I would not be normal again.

But she did not stop there. At the Cartier Met after-party, she stepped out of the metallic mask and into a metallic gown from Ashi Studio — the whole look had the bronze effect of old statues, making her look like a sculpture herself. Then at the GQ Met Party, she wore a demi-couture ensemble by Harris Reed with M.F. Husain’s painting The Woman with the Sitar on the bodice, paying tribute to one of India’s most famous modern painters. All three looks were blurring the line between art and fashion, just in different directions.

Bhavitha Mandava

Bhavitha Mandava debuted in the most talked-about look of the Indian contingent. When I first saw it, I did not even believe it was true or that she had really walked the carpet.

Her ensemble was the couture version of the look she wore when she opened Chanel’s Métiers d’Art show in December 2025. Instead of bringing the look forward, she brought it back to where it started — her story, on the Met carpet, in a slightly elevated way. The ensemble required 250 hours of work by Chanel’s ateliers to look that way.

There was a lot of debate swirling on the internet, as fashion’s biggest night has not seen such a casual look from a female attendee. This is a night known for its extravaganza, and her coming off-duty did not sit well with many. The story behind the look is genuinely interesting, but on a theme that was explicitly asking for art and intention, following the dress code could have made it one of the big looks of the night. Showing your story through clothes is a bold choice, but the theme gave everyone a brief, and this one quietly sidestepped it.

In this whole fiasco, Chanel won. The recent show was back in global conversation, the debate kept the name circling for days, and the attention never really left the house. Whether the look was for Bhavitha or for Chanel is the question I keep coming back to.

What This Group Said, Together

What has changed is not just who is attending, but what they are choosing to say when they get there. Almost everyone this year brought something specific — a craft, a region, a memory, a name stitched into a cape.

Fashion is art when someone makes it so. This year, the Indians who attended made a strong enough case.

The theme: Fashion Is Art. And that changes everything about how you read the room. It is not just about who showed up dressed. It is about who served the art and who served the look. Who came with a story, a body of work draped in intention, and who simply came to be a mannequin on the most famous staircase in fashion. The craft matters, yes. But so does the meaning behind it, the body it is on, and the storytelling that comes with it.

Subscribe now

The Costume Institute does not pick themes randomly, and this year’s is a direct nod to one of the longest-running debates in fashion: Is fashion art? Tonight, the answer walked through the front door.

Setting The Stage

This year’s gala was co-chaired by four names that, combined, cover nearly every dimension of what it means to be culturally powerful in 2026 as a person and as a woman: Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and the ever-present Anna Wintour.

Anna Wintour arrived in a custom blue-green Chanel dress with a feathered cape. The woman who built this night, dressed for it accordingly. Nicole Kidman wore a red sequined gown with feather detailing at the sleeves, also by Chanel. There are a lot of feathers tonight, and Chanel is clearly having a moment.

Venus Williams arrived in a Swarovski crystal black gown with an intricately designed necklace that draws directly from the Venus Rosewater Dish and, more specifically, from Robert Pruitt’s painted portrait of Venus Williams that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. She wore a painting of herself to an event celebrating art. That is not a coincidence. That is a statement.

And then there was Beyoncé, returning to the Met Gala after a decade away, in a diamond-encrusted skeletal gown by Olivier Rousteing with a feathered cape sweeping from beige to dark grey and a matching headpiece. She came with Jay-Z and Blue Ivy, who made her own Met debut in a billowing white gown. Beyoncé said on the carpet that the night was about celebrating whatever God gave you, all of it. The skeleton motif was not just aesthetic. It was anatomy. The body beneath the fashion, literally embezzeled in diamonds.

Art You Could Wear

If there was a category that defined this Met Gala, it was looks that did not just reference art. They became it.

Anne Hathaway wore a hand-painted custom Michael Kors gown in black silk mikado, painted by artist Peter McGough and inspired by John Keats’ poem Ode on a Grecian Urn. The front of the dress shows a hand reaching toward a dove, and the back carries a full rendering of Irene, the Greek goddess of peace. This is her ninth Met Gala, and it might be her most intentional. She is not wearing art. She is the vessel for it. The whole look is a moving poem and, given what is happening in the world right now, quietly political too.

Hunter Schafer arrived in a custom Prada inspired by Gustav Klimt’s painting Mada Primavesi. The dress, with its tears and holes and almost-falling-apart quality, looks like it is halfway through destruction or halfway through becoming something else entirely. The long floral underlayer underneath is very Prada, but the concept is very Klimt. It is one of the most direct engagements with the theme of the night. Not inspired by art. Reconstructed from it.

Karan Johar made his Met Gala debut tonight and for me, he is the best-dressed man on that carpet. His look, designed by Manish Malhotra, brings the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma to life. Hand-painted motifs, zardozi embroidery, architectural references to pillars, lotuses, and swans across a dramatic cape worn over a vintage-styled bandhgala. The look took over 5,600 hours to complete, with 80 artisans working on it. Karan titled his note about the look Framed In Eternity, writing that Varma “painted feelings” and that this is what he has always tried to do in cinema. The cape is a moving canvas. The man wearing it understood the assignment at a level very few people on that carpet did tonight.

Subscribe now

Ashley Graham wore a DiPetsa gown and finished her look with silver chrome-dipped hands, a nod to the sculptors whose works fill the Met itself. It sounds like a small detail. It is not. It is the kind of detail that makes a look go from pretty to pointed.

Angela Bassett arrived in a custom Prabal Gurung gown in full pink florals, inspired by Laura Wheeler Waring’s 1927 Harlem Renaissance painting Girl in Pink Dress. She said on the carpet it was about stepping into your power. She looks so ethereal here, the whole look is romantic and striking, and honestly it makes my inner child want to reach right into the frame. A painting of a woman, reimagined as a gown, worn by one of the most powerful women in the room. The circle is complete.

Sabrina Carpenter came in a custom Dior dress wrapped in actual film reels from the 1954 Audrey Hepburn film Sabrina. A film named Sabrina, worn by Sabrina. A tribute to cinema, which is also a form of art. And as someone on the petite side myself, whenever I see a petite woman completely owning a look like this, it is a reminder that it is not about the body. It is about what you do with it. She did everything with it.

Paloma Elsesser wore a Bureau of Imagination gown by Francesco Risso, a patchwork creation made from around 30 vintage dresses sourced from different decades on eBay, then handpainted, beaded, and embroidered with metal embellishments. It looks like a collage of memories. You cannot replicate it. That is entirely the point.

Sabine Getty was among the very first looks of the night in an Ashi Studio creation that was the perfect blend of art and fashion. The texture felt like clothing, the illustration felt like art. A quiet one, but one of the defining looks for the theme, even if the cameras took a while to catch up to it.

The Body As The Canvas

The Costume Institute’s Costume Art exhibition is organised around what it means to dress a body, across life stages and ideals and representations. Some guests took that entirely literally.

Heidi Klum looked like a whole marble statue in a custom creation by Mike Marino. The look is inspired by classical sculptures like the Veiled Vestal, and her body, hair, face, and arms are all rendered as if carved from stone. If she had stood still on those steps it would have been genuinely hard to tell person from sculpture. She is personally one of my favourite looks of the night. She satisfied the imagination for what this theme could be in the most complete and committed way possible.

Lisa wore a custom Robert Wun white gown with a Swarovski crystal-embedded veil, the image on it being a bride lifting her own veil, with the hands rendered in 3D. It is one of those looks you knew someone had to bring to this carpet the moment the theme was announced. The eerie feeling it gives is not quite gothic, not quite angelic. It is something stranger and more beautiful than either.

Eileen Gu arrived in her bubble dress by Iris Van Herpen, adorned with 15,000 glass bubbles and an actual bubble machine built into the dress itself. Wherever she walked, bubbles followed. It looked like a magic trick. It looked like a dream. It took 2,550 hours to make. It is surely one of the most purely joyful looks of the night, which is its own kind of art.

Gwendoline Christie wore an eerie, breathtaking gown by Giles Deacon, with a mask of her own face created by artist Gillian Wearing and a headpiece by Stephen Jones made from ostrich and pheasant feathers. Every time you look at this look, a different detail becomes the centre of attention. It gives entirely different energy depending on where your eyes land first. That is not a fashion look. That is an experience.

Janelle Monáe looked like she came from a future full of nature, which is a genuinely hard thing to imagine, and she made you imagine it anyway. Her custom Christian Siriano ensemble was made from green moss, 3D butterflies, recycled materials, and metallic wires. She told the press on the carpet: remember what made you human, nature is talking to us. Art with a message. Fashion with a conscience.

Isha Ambani brought something sentimental and staggering to the carpet. A custom Gaurav Gupta saree woven from pure gold threads by artisans at Swadesh, inspired by ancient Indian frescoes, with hand-painted pichwai-style motifs along the border. Her blouse alone was adorned with over 1,800 carats of diamonds, emeralds, polki and kundan, stones from her mother Nita Ambani’s personal collection, including a historic Sarpech piece once part of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s collection. More than 1,200 hours. Fifty artisans. A sculpture by Subodh Gupta carried alongside, with flowers that look real but are not. She brought wearable heritage to fashion’s most watched night, and it asked to be looked at slowly.

Diya Mehta Jatia arrived in a Mayyur Girotra creation that stopped me completely. The dress is made from shola, a craft form native to West Bengal, where the pith of a water-based plant is carved and shaped into sculptural forms. Laid over a Kanjeevaram silk base, the whole look reads as an ivory sculpture first and a dress second. That is the point. Shola work has lived for centuries in wedding processions and religious ceremonies — here it is on the steps of the Met, doing exactly what this theme asked for. Art that already existed, worn as fashion for the first time on a stage this size.

Subscribe now

Ananya Birla made her debut in a structured black couture outfit by Robert Wun, styled by Rhea Kapoor, paired with a metallic sculptural mask by artist Subodh Gupta. Stainless steel, futuristic, a face behind a face. I need to get my hands on that mask and I already know I would not be normal again.

Princess Gauravi Kumari wore Prabal Gurung, a gown reimagined from the vintage chiffon saree of her grandmother Maharani Gayatri Devi. The colour pink is an ode to Jaipur, the Pink City. The pearls are an ode to Gayatri Devi, who was known for chiffon and pearls. Every single element of this look has a reason. That is what intention looks like when it is fully realised.

Sawai Padmanabh Singh also wore Prabal, in a velvet coat over traditional silhouettes, with zardozi and zari embroidery and a full mirrored sun on the back, a nod to his Suryavanshi lineage. The shoes were made by the same craftsman who has worked for their household for over 50 years. A look that is not just an ode to a culture but an applause for the people who keep it alive.

The Ones That Surprised

Bad Bunny showed up as an old man. Grey hair, special effects makeup, a cane, a self-designed black suit in collaboration with Zara. The exhibition this year explores aging as part of the Costume Art theme, the body across its life stages. Bad Bunny showed up in costume, for an exhibition about costumes, dressed as himself from the future. That is the most conceptually sharp move of the night. No one else came close to that level of left-field thinking.

Maya Hawke arrived in a black-and-white Dior ball gown with small black floral details, and her twirling on the carpet became one of the images of the night. Sometimes a great look is just a great moment.

SZA looked like a fairy in a yellow corset dress by Emily Adams Bode Aujla, made from a reworked vintage saree sourced from eBay, with a transparent butterfly-inspired cape-cum-wings. Her headpiece, layered with real flowers, jewels, and shells, was the most attention-commanding thing on her head, and she made it look effortless. There is something deeply beautiful about a dress made from a saree, worn at an art gala, by someone who carries it like she was born in it.

Madonna, when she came into frame, I genuinely felt gagged. A pirate ship headdress, waves of sheer fabric held in place by six women in colourful gowns wearing blindfolds, a gothic Saint Laurent custom by Anthony Vaccarello, and a brass circular trumpet. Inspired by Leonora Carrington’s 1945 painting The Temptation of St. Anthony. It was chaos dressed as a ceremony. It was exactly what Madonna has always been.

Sombr, after seeing so many men arrive in black and in conventional and safe choices, came out in a custom Valentino look with a hand-embroidered tulle and chiffon cape with a lace top underneath, giving the whole thing a romantic, dazzling quality. It was a relief.

What This Met Gala Actually Was

Honest verdict: this was a good Met Gala, not a great one.

The theme was the most open brief fashion that has been given in years. Fashion Is Art should have produced the wildest, strangest, most ambitious carpet of the decade. And there were moments of that, genuinely. Heidi Klum is becoming a statue. Karan Johar carrying 80 artisans and five millennia of Indian painting on his back. Bad Bunny aging himself 40 years for an exhibition about the ageing body. Anne Hathaway becoming a Grecian urn. Those are real moments.

But a lot of people played it safe. A lot of beautiful gowns showed up with no brief, no story, no argument. And for this theme specifically, that is the one thing that was genuinely hard to forgive. You had one job: mean something. Not everyone did.

And then there is the thing that I cannot stop thinking about. A theme about fashion as art, built around an exhibition that literally features Rei Kawakubo’s work for Comme des Garçons, and not a single CDG look on the main carpet. The lumps-and-bumps collection, the one that spent decades arguing that fashion is not about the ideal body but about questioning what a body even is, showed up at the pre-party on Friday night and not on the carpet where it belonged, and it quite disappointed me.

Still, the highs were high enough. And the ones who did show up with intention showed up fully. That is worth something. I have not been able to write about everyone, and there are a lot of other looks that are worth noticing.

Fashion is art when someone makes it so. Tonight, enough people did.

Share Fashion Interlude

A saree is not just a garment; it is an emotion. It is a single, unbroken length of fabric that changes entirely with the drape, the fabric, the colour. It might be one of the few garments that fully adapts to the person wearing it.

This intelligence lies in its architecture. A saree is a form without stitching — pure potential waiting for a body to give it shape. The act of draping is an intimate, ritualistic conversation between the wearer’s hands and the fabric. The wearer becomes the architect, designing a structure that must hold her body. There is no fixed template. The garment becomes itself only when she does.

Subscribe now

And this architecture has never spoken just one language. The act of draping is a language with countless regional dialects. The thick, dhoti-style Nauvari of Maharashtra, once worn by women who moved with swords and bangles.

The soft, white Mundum Neriyathum of Kerala, adorning the body for temple visits. The Gujarati front pallu exists to showcase intricate design, making the fabric itself the centrepiece.

In Assam, the Mekhala Chador, with its separate skirt and wrap, transforms a saree into flowing pieces that celebrate the rhythm of the land and the pulse of festivity. Every region has its own answer to the same question.

Because it is an unstitched plane of fabric, it subverts the very idea of a standard size. There is no ideal saree body. The fabric adjusts. It flows and embraces curves and edges alike, playing with the wearer’s form. It moves with you, not around you. That is where it works best.

The same shape carries a completely different weight depending on what the moment asks. For a wedding, a saree is crisp, heavy with embellishment, vibrant in reds and golds that radiate celebration. In mourning, it softens — lighter fabric, simple white or muted colour, restrained draping. The garment does not impose meaning on its own. It speaks only what the wearer pours into it.

This is not new. It has been doing this for thousands of years. The saree is one of the oldest living garments. Its presence traces back to the Indus Valley Civilisation — seen in the draped figures of Mohenjo-daro and referenced in the Vedas. It has no shoulder pads from the eighties, no low-rise waist from the 2000s. It cannot be pinned to a single moment in time because it has lived through all of them, absorbing each era without belonging to any.

Share

Which is why what is happening to it now is not a revival. The Indian fashion industry understands this intimately. The handloom saree sector sustains millions of weavers across the country, one of the largest craft economies in the world and the designers working within it are not all walking in the same direction.

Sanjay Garg of Raw Mango made the saree the choice of the modern Indian woman — handwoven cottons and silks in muted, considered palettes, the saree returned to daily life without excess.

Sabyasachi went entirely the other way: maximalist, embroidered, unapologetically grand, making the saree feel central again.

Anavila built her world in linen — slow, unhurried, the saree as something you wear entirely on your own terms.

Abraham & Thakore treated it as a design object, structural and spare, focusing on what the saree is, not just what it represents. The same nine yards, four completely different answers.

The first saree I ever wore was my mother’s. In that moment, there was a tinge of happiness, a feeling of having grown up. When a woman wears a hand-down saree, she is not just wearing a garment; she is on an emotional journey, carrying the weight and wisdom of her mother’s or grandmother’s stories in every drape.

The saree has continued — not because it is precious, but because it keeps being chosen. By the weaver, the designer, the daughter, the woman standing in a Bengaluru queue because she wants something that will outlast every trend she has ever followed.

It was never waiting at the edge of fashion, hoping to be invited in. The saree is fashion — it always has been. The only thing that has changed is how many people are finally able to see it.

Share Fashion Interlude

It felt like you.

But before you left, you had already run the whole thing through a filter. You imagined the room. You imagined the people in it. You edited. And that edit—the one that happened before anyone saw you is exactly where the myth of personal style lives.

We call it personal because it feels chosen. The fabrics you keep returning to, the colours that feel right, the silhouettes that make you stand a certain way. But chosen from what? From how wide a menu? And who wrote it?

Maya Angelou said this about life. She could have been talking about what hangs in your wardrobe.

Subscribe now

You Don’t Dress the Same Everywhere

At home the clothes are looser. Nobody is watching, so the outfit stops being a message.

Step outside and something shifts. Not a decision, exactly but more like a reflex. The clothes become more considered, because being seen changes the calculation. At university, the institution narrows your options before you even open the wardrobe.

There are things that feel normal there, and things that feel loud, and you know the difference without being told. Every space arrives with an unspoken visual grammar. Within weeks of being somewhere new, you start speaking it.

The same person. Different rooms. Different clothes. Not always because they wanted to be different because the room expected something, and they answered.

Personal style lives in the tension between what you want to wear and what the situation is quietly making you wear. Most of the time, the negotiation happens below the level of decision.

The Audience You Dress For Isn’t There Yet

Most outfit decisions happen in response to an audience that doesn’t exist yet.

Before anyone sees you, you have already imagined how you will be read. You run through it — the new place, the people, what your clothes will say before you open your mouth. You swap something out. Reconsider. Take off what felt right at home because it now feels like too much of a statement.

We anticipate how we will be perceived and adjust for it. The imagined audience is always harsher than the real one — more scrutinising, more certain in its judgments. So we dress for a jury that has already decided, and edit accordingly.

A large part of what we call personal style is preemptive social performance, happening before the social situation even begins.

The Edit We Make for Belonging

Underneath that imagined audience is something older: the need to belong.

Expression asks: what do I want to say? Belonging asks: will they let me stay if I say it? Most of us live in the negotiation between those two questions; the outfit that feels like us, but calibrated.

Share

What looks like a style preference is also a social one. The same instinct runs through most people’s wardrobes, quietly. You reach for what feels like you and also like something the room can hold. Both things, at once, without deliberating.

Every City Has a Frequency

Varanasi has a devotional, almost old-world rhythm. The clothes here carry that; more culturally considered, sarees and kurtas woven into the everyday, a desi aesthetic that feels absorbed rather than assembled.

It would be different in Goa, looser, sun-bleached. Different in Mumbai, faster, more constructed. In Paris, more restrained and deliberate. In New York, more varied but purposeful.

Every city has a visual rhythm, and most people end up inside it without choosing to be. You arrive somewhere new, and within weeks the things that felt normal back home start to feel slightly off. You reach for different things. The wardrobe adjusts.

You didn’t decide to dress like the city. It just happened — the way your pace changes without you noticing.

Standing visibly apart from a place’s frequency creates a low hum of unease. Most people would rather not feel it, so they absorb the grammar of where they are and start to speak it back. This is the invisible dress code — not a rule anyone wrote, but one almost everyone follows.

So What Is “Personal” About It?

What we call personal style is a version of ourselves that has already been edited — by spaces, by the need to belong, by imagined audiences, by the cities we inhabit.

“You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot.” Style works like this. Not something that rises purely from inside, untouched. The world, filtered through you. Every space you moved through, every room you tried to belong to, every glance you absorbed and factored in — shows up in what you wear, in the choices that feel most like yours.

And it shifts. You do not dress the same as you did five years ago, not just because trends moved, but because you did. The spaces changed. The belonging you needed shifted. Style is not a fixed thing to find. It is an ongoing negotiation between who you are and everything pressing in around you.

The myth is not that personal style exists. It is that it ever operates alone.

Support Fashion Interlude

Share Fashion Interlude