How India Became an Artisanal Menswear Powerhouse
Early this year, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wore a black suit to his inauguration with coat and leather gloves to match. He looked sharp, as he often does, but nondescript.
Until he unbuttoned his top layer to be sworn in and revealed, stark and elegant against his white shirt, a silk tie tastefully embroidered with four-petal flowers. This major moment for the young mayor was merely the latest high-profile endorsement for Kartik Research, a label that already counts A-listers like Paul Mescal and Kendrick Lamar among his clients.
The brand is overseen by Kartik Kumra, a 25-year-old bespectacled designer who launched the line in 2021. Yet in just five years, he’s gone from a COVID-era newcomer to a key figure bringing Indian slow-fashion craft onto the global stage. His label was named an LVMH Prize semi-finalist in 2023 and made its runway debut at Paris Fashion Week last June, becoming the first-ever Indian brand on the official calendar, only months after opening a flagship store in downtown New York. Both high-fashion validated and insider-approved, Kartik Research’s embroidered shirts and flaxen linen pants, all made in India, are sold at stores as disparate as Selfridges and Ven. Space.
Kartik Research may be the most visible Indian menswear brand in fashion but it’s part of a wider generation of talent honed at home and primed to go global. A new wave of independent Indian menswear labels is rising alongside it, based in cities across India, from Delhi and Jaipur to Panchkula and Gurgaon. Drawing on the country’s centuries-old textile craftsmanship, they’re making clothes that are extremely wearable and extremely personal.
Founded in 2014, GARUDA-SS specializes in avant-garde, utility-oriented gear, almost entirely in black; ITOH mixes Indian and Japanese aesthetics to craft relaxed classic silhouettes; Rkive City — whose founder, Ritwik Khanna, collaborated with Kumra on Kartik Research’s Fall/Winter 2023 collection — is known for deconstructed tailoring, including blazers with fringed details made of textile waste; the young label toward(s), run out of Delhi suburb Faridabad, approaches workwear- and military-leaning garments through artisanal, naturally-dyed fabrics in muted, earthy tones; and HARAGO, launched in 2019, offers a luxurious take on what it calls “resort wear,” from hand-painted and beaded silk shirts to appliqué trousers.
None of this has the anonymity of the 2020s’ so-called “quiet luxury.” These are artful garments full of understated expressiveness, like purple linen shirts embellished with flowers, ink-dyed tweed overcoats and silk-lined blousons enlivened by kantha stitching, a historic Bengali technique typically used to create beautiful layered quilts.
“I see parallels with what happened in Japan a few decades ago,” says Khanna, founder of Rkive City, nodding to another hotbed of domestic production. “Together, we’re defining the next era of Indian fashion: globally relevant without losing its sense of place.”
This potential momentum comes with great responsibility, says Harsh Agarwal of Jaipur-based label HARAGO. “We have to be really careful that Indian fashion doesn’t get reduced to visual tropes, the kind that feel instantly recognizable or easily ‘exportable.’” There’s a danger, he feels, that growing global enthusiasm for Indian-made clothes could tip into something uncannily Orientalist. “When people say something is ‘inherently Indian’, you have to remember that India went through nearly 200 years of colonial rule,” says Divyam Jain of toward(s). “There’s an India before and after the West. It’s known today for vibrant, bold colors, but for thousands of years, Indian people didn’t dye their clothes at all — [they wore] the browns and blacks of the natural fibers.”
With 1.47 billion people living on a landmass a third the size of the U.S., India is huge and wildly diverse, even just when it comes to clothes. “But everything you know about India is what you know about northern India,” says Suhail Sahrawat of GARUDA-SS. “In reality,” Khanna adds, “there are countless regional techniques across the country, from weaving and dyeing to appliqué, repair, and construction.”
Agarwal’s label HARAGO, for example, works with kalamkari hand-painting, a freehand technique from Andhra Pradesh in southeastern India. Rkive City’s clothes, all made from post-consumer textiles, are deeply embedded in Delhi’s repair culture, where “repairing is not a concept or trend, but a necessity and a habit,” says Khanna. For its fabrics, ITOH collaborates with West Bengal weavers who make use of hand-operated pit looms, known as matha tant.
One of GARUDA-SS’s jackets is kantha-stitched in Jaipur, lined with eri silk from Guwahati — an almost woolly silk spun from cocoons only after the moth has emerged — and finished with buttons made in Zirakpur. And in its Fall/Winter 2026 collection, toward(s) will introduce undyed wool from Rajasthan camels alongside natural pigment dyes indigenous to India, including khair from catechu bark, myrobalan from the fruit of its namesake tree, and Bengal mud extracted from the region’s iron-rich soil.
Though they all have their own singular voices, these brands are much less about spectacle than human proximity, with materials passing through specific hands, communities, and traditions to shape a finished garment. And yet, taken together, the results are pretty spectacular.
Not everything from India would work beyond its borders, though. Speaking about Rajasthan camel wool, Jain says “we could only use about five to ten percent of these fibers for our fabrics, because in its pure form it’s too coarse to be worn.” Outside Rajasthan, that is. “The people there can wear it because their skin has adapted to it, and they’re in constant contact with the camels.” The same goes for muga silk from Assam in India’s northeast. A rare, handwoven silk with a natural golden sheen, muga has a drier hand and much more durability than soft, fluid silks. “I’m pretty sure most Western customers wouldn’t reach for it,” says Sahrawat. “It’s pretty itchy on the skin.”
These things matter because, so far, the audiences these brands have built aren't at home — they’re abroad. Of Kartik Research’s 65 stockists, only three are located in India, one of which is its own flagship store in New Delhi. The six retailers carrying toward(s) this year, including Komune on buzzy Orchard Street in New York, are all based in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Meanwhile, HARAGO is shifting from wholesale to an online-only model. “Our clothes simply appeal more to people outside India,” says Agarwal.
It leaves these self-aware Indian designers navigating a paradox. Their designs are informed by homegrown textiles and craftsmanship, yet refuse to be flattened into a tidy, export-ready version of “Indianness.” At the same time, the global market sustains most of them — for now. “Indian men don’t typically spend their money on the clothes you wear daily,” says Jain. “That mindset is slowly changing, even if it’s mostly because of Western exposure.”
Case in point: when Paris luxury department store Galeries Lafayette opened its debut Indian store in Mumbai at the end of last year, Rkive City was among the first brands it stocked.
