India and its vibrant aesthetic are all over the place proper now. From the V&A’s nod to Indian royalty in its Cartier present, to design festivals resembling PAD (Pavilion of Art and Design), TEFAF (The European Fine Art Foundation) and Frieze, the place Indian artwork, jewelry and design have a stronghold. In shops — Harrods, Selfridges, Bergdorf Goodman — manufacturers resembling Sabyasachi High Jewellery, Kartik Research and Lovebirds sit alongside global names. And on runways, India’s presence is not peripheral, it’s pivotal.
It’s no secret that the world needs a slice of the Indian pie. With a luxurious market at present valued at $17 billion and projected to triple by 2030, an prosperous Gen Z cohort 377 million robust, and rising cultural capital, India is drawing global consideration. Dior’s Fall 2023 present in Mumbai could nicely have been the tipping level. That second which was extensively Instagrammed, editorialised, and held up as a turning level, set a brand new template for the way the nation might be platformed. The set was fairly actually India: the Gateway of India as backdrop, the garments — woven Madras checks and draped lungi-style skirts — had been crafted by Chanakya School of Craft (a longtime collaborator, having embroidered the mise-en-scene at most of Dior’s exhibits beneath artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s helm), and a musical rating that paid homage to Indian classical traditions.
Dior’s Fall 2023 present in Mumbai
Last month in Paris, as company at the Louis Vuitton menswear present took their seats earlier than a 2,700 sq.m. set designed by architect Bijoy Jain and his Studio Mumbai, impressed by the historical Indian sport of snakes and ladders, it felt like a sign of continuity: that India is not only momentary inspiration however a sustained presence in luxurious’s creativeness. The present by artistic director Pharrell Williams featured rickshaw-shaped luggage, trunks, sneakers and jackets with a smattering of embroideries from India, and a soundtrack by Oscar-winning composer A.R. Rahman.
Louis Vuitton x Bijoy Jain’s snakes and ladder set for the Spring-Summer 2026 menswear assortment
Cultures as pattern
Just every week earlier, at Milan Fashion Week, Prada despatched fashions down the runway in Kolhapuris (these hardback quotidian leather-based sandals native to Maharashtra) paired with shorts and T-shirts, and with design particulars of the humble footwear additionally seen on rings, and facings of leather-based jackets. What adopted was an avalanche of pushback and adoration, in equal measure, from the South Asian nook of the Internet. Who made the Kolhapuris? Why weren’t they credited? Why the silence? Why now?
A mannequin presents a creation from Prada’s Spring-Summer 2026 menswear assortment
| Photo Credit:
Reuters
In distinction, the Louis Vuitton present was celebrated: that is how collaboration ought to be carried out. Visionary. Complete.
And but, past the headlines and viral takes, the query persists: what now? How can this cultural bridge, tentatively being constructed between India and the world, transfer from second to motion?
“Everybody celebrates that Louis Vuitton has done this, Prada has done that. But sadly, it doesn’t have any real impact on the business of fashion,” says Maximiliano Modesti, the French-Italian founding father of Les Ateliers 2M, an India-based craft and embroidery studio that works with global luxurious homes, together with Chanel and Hermès. “Craft is soft power,” he explains. “If this level of craft were available in a European country, or even China, it would have been used to build a cultural and economic empire by now.” But for many years, that energy was extracted slightly than credited — India’s artisans fuelling couture and ready-to-wear from Paris to New York, typically with out a label, voice or seat at the desk.
Maximiliano Modesti
| Photo Credit:
Abhay Maskara
Still, progress is being made. Modesti credit personal gamers in India resembling Sangita Jindal, who launched the Jindal Craft Prize, Nita Ambani’s work with Swadesh (a platform for artisans), and artist-entrepreneur Anita Lal’s newly launched Good Earth Foundation, as key to preserving and selling heritage. Says Modesti, “In India, you always need private initiative to counterbalance the lack of political will. It’s been true of education, healthcare, and now finally, craft and design.”
Even so, Modesti’s cautious of trend’s tendency to cycle by way of cultures as tendencies. “One season it’s India, the next it could be Africa. It’s always India seen through a historical prism. But if you know what’s happening now with Indian architects, designers, creatives — the Indian scene is flamboyant.”
Fashion photographer Rid Burman agrees. “There’s so much more than what gets shown globally. Brands latch onto palaces and Bollywood, but India also has arthouse cinema, a thriving art scene, classical and contemporary music. There’s a huge cultural backbone that’s being overlooked,” he says.
So far, Indian aesthetics have largely been filtered by way of a western gaze. The alternative forward is in letting Indian creators inform the story on their very own phrases.
Looking past the palaces
One promising counterpoint to this historic sample is the Nike x NorBlack NorWhite collaboration. More than simply making use of Indian motifs to global streetwear, the marketing campaign was conceived, led and styled domestically. Founders Mriga Kapadiya and Amrit Kumar — who returned to India from Toronto to begin the label — solid Indian feminine athletes, directed the shoot, and formed the narrative. The end result was vibrant, fashionable, and confident.
The Nike x NorBlack NorWhite collaboration
Designer Kartik Kumra’s label Kartik Research — worn by the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Stephen Curry, Brad Pitt and Riz Ahmed — is certainly one of the sharpest expressions of Indian craft assembly modern design. Built on strategies resembling bandhani and kantha, the model has proven in Paris and is stocked by retailers from London to New York. Production is anchored in India, with a powerful focus on small-batch making and native materials sourcing.
Last yr, Kumra revealed How to Make it in India — a zine-meets-manifesto that argues for outlining success on one’s personal phrases. His multilingual method — visually, culturally and commercially — is rewriting the rulebook on how India can present up on the global stage: not by conforming, however by main with its personal phrases and textures. “I’m definitely aware of the connotations [India has], but I think the idea is to not be very on the nose with the referencing,” says Kumra. “It’s always a tricky balance; leaning into heritage but avoiding being too literal. Hopefully, the conversation around Indian culture globally can pivot from being overly nostalgic or stuck in its ways into something more generative or weirdly futuristic.”
Designs from Kartik Kumra’s label Kartik Research
In jewelry, Maison Aneka is reframing what Indian design can imply. “We want to show what a rooted-yet-modern India looks like,” says CEO Ankit Mehta. With design groups based mostly in Mumbai and Paris, and a boutique on Place Vendôme, flanked by Schiaparelli, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Boucheron, in addition to in Printemps and Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda, Aneka’s items replicate a cosmopolitan ethos. “Honestly, most people I’ve met don’t know what ‘Indian jewellery’ looks like. They have vague visuals of palaces, elephants, heritage. But the India of today hasn’t yet been defined for them,” he provides.
Designer Ritwik Khanna of Rkive City, recognized for his round trend apply, was certainly one of a handful of South Asians invited to Louis Vuitton’s Paris present. He met Williams at a Vogue India lunch earlier in the yr and shared his work. “India is no longer just a textile or embroidery country — it’s an innovations country,” he says. “If someone from India creates something relevant, efficient, and of high global quality, there’s no way to side-eye that.”
Designer Ritwik Khanna
| Photo Credit:
Abyinaav
A Rkive City marketing campaign
| Photo Credit:
Arvaan Kumar
Will the subsequent luxurious model be from India?
For product designer and entrepreneur Vikram Goyal, the ambition is to shift India’s identification from provider to storyteller. His work, typically proven at PAD London (this yr will mark his third in collaboration with Milan’s Nilufar Gallery), and a latest collaboration with luxurious model de Gournay that translated his repoussé brass murals into hand-painted wallpapers, is steeped in Indian craft however formed for a global viewers. A big-scale mural can be in the works for Design Miami later this yr. “There’s this general trend towards celebrating the handmade and the artisanal across disciplines. People are saying, ‘this is fresh, this is new’,” he shares. “There is no other country in the world with so much craft, cultural narrative and storytelling as there is in India. And for those stories to be told in a contemporary, intelligent way has been a joy for us.”
In high-quality artwork, too, the lens is widening. “There’s a lot more interest coming from institutions, curators, collectors,” says Roshini Vadehra, director of New Delhi-based Vadehra Art Gallery. “South Asian artists aren’t speaking in narrow, regional voices. Whether it’s gender politics or geopolitics, the themes are global.” Earlier this yr, Vadehra performed a key position in facilitating the Serpentine Gallery’s landmark retrospective of modernist painter Arpita Singh — marking the first main solo exhibition of an Indian artist at the establishment in over a decade.
Roshini Vadehra
The gallery labored carefully with Singh’s household and studio, and was instrumental in securing loans and shaping the narrative of the present. At Frieze London this October, the gallery will current an all-women showcase from throughout the subcontinent and diaspora — a mirrored image, she says, of a extra interconnected, nuanced voice rising from the area.
Artist Himali Singh Soin at Tate Britain
| Photo Credit:
Fiona Hanson
Designer Nimish Shah, founding father of Shift, attracts a parallel with Japan’s rise in the Seventies, when manufacturers resembling Comme des Garçons and Issey Miyake reframed Japanese craft into avant-garde trend. “It elevated Japan from being a traditional supplier to the source of some of the edgiest designs. That’s where India is headed.”
Back in 1998, Modesti pushed manufacturers like Isabel Marant to start labelling their items Made in India. “She was the only one who listened,” he recollects. Hermès, too, has included the label on each scarf, cashmere and carpet produced by Les Ateliers 2M since 2005. But there’s work to be carried out. Government intervention, particularly. When that’s achieved, he says, “The next luxury brands will be born from India. Will it be Sabyasachi? Or someone entirely new? I don’t know. But it will happen.”
Khanna agrees. “The only shows I’ve ever seen in my life have celebrated India,” he says, recalling Dior’s Mumbai present (which he admits to “sneaking into”) and Louis Vuitton’s Paris manufacturing. “Today, when kids hear that Kartik Kumra is a semi-finalist in the LVMH Prize, or that Bijoy Jain did the LV set, they grow up thinking they belong on the global stage. That they are entitled to be a part of all this equally.”
The query is not whether or not the world is watching India. It is whether or not India can construct the artistic and structural infrastructure to make this consideration lasting — and completely its personal.
The author is an impartial journalist based mostly in London, writing on trend, luxurious and life-style.
