Growing up far from fashion’s urban centres can make this world seem almost mythical. As a teenager in Indore , I would walk around an old chikoo tree in my backyard, hatching grand schemes to manifest my dream of working as a magazine editor. It’s a similar journey for these four young designers who hail from Nainital , Bijnor, Almora and Ramgarh, where the farthest point of civilisation can be reached within 15 minutes.
But small-town origin stories can fuel grand ambitions, as these creatives prove. They’ve adopted a radical approach to their craft, where proportions, techniques and ideas move beyond tried-and-tested formulas into delightfully fresh expressions . For some, memories of home inspire new designs while for others, they spark ambition.
Princess gowns with leg-of mutton sleeves, tulle skirts , lace dresses with Claudine collars—call it an elevated version of a church lady’s Sunday best, but that’s the signature offering at Ikshit Pande’s brand, QUOD. His childhood education at a Catholic school is the reason this Parsons School of Design graduate exhibits an affinity for subverting stereotypical iconography into modern fashion language. The 37-year-old started his fashion career seven years ago after leaving his job as a brand strategist.
His work now features on magazine covers. “Fashion was never a part of my world growing up. I was into international pop music and that was difficult to come by where I grew up, so I would wait for months on end for new English music tapes to arrive at the store and would take my pick using all of my saved pocket money,” he says.
His first tryst with fashion? The cover art found on cassettes of Madonna’s and Janet Jackson’s albums from the ’90s. “I remember discussing the low-rise jeans worn by Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera with a friend and expressing my inability to wrap my head around them,” says Pande, who attributes his understanding of branding, marketing, and aesthetics to his interest in music. Now based in New Delhi, he travels the world finding new homes for his creations at stores such as Bergdorf Goodman .
But he still prefers the quiet of his small, quaint hometown when he needs to tap into his creative energy. “I visit home often. Although after decades of travelling and not calling one place in particular ‘home’, it has become more of a feeling than a place.
” Give Mansi Chauhan fabric scraps and your recyclables, and she will whip them into an interlocked jacket or a multihued dress. Her latest work features in the Tollywood film Kalki 2898 AD , whose directors recruited her to design pieces that would otherwise have needed the support of visual effects. “There’s no real market for something experimental that traverses the boundaries of high art and fashion, which is where my passion lies.
This project seemed like a challenge and an area in which I could use the things I had learnt.” Based in Noida, Chauhan retails her line through Instagram and manages an export house for brands across the US and Spain—a life she might not have imagined during her school days in Bijnor, a sparsely populated area with no malls or fine-dining restaurants in sight. “When I whizz past my old school in the car, it’s surreal to remember that I would once sit on the floor there and study.
It makes me tear up at times to think how far I have come,” says the 28-year-old. “Born to a middle-class family in a small town, I didn’t even know what a career in art and design was called.” Her sister had told her about a batchmate who went on to study at NIFT (National Institute of Fashion Technology), which is how Chauhan ended up at NIFT Kangra.
“When I arrived, I did not know what avant-garde fashion was,” she says. But the gifted artist soon became a straight-A student. Chauhan’s key to beating the competition was making her Achilles heel the strongest weapon in her artillery.
“When you don’t know the rules, your mind is not boxed in with existing ideas,” she says. Part of the coterie young designers making changes in the industry, Chauhan has developed a signature with creations that feature a mix of complex textures forged from scrap materials, bioplastic and things that you may never think of as relating to fashion. “I don’t want people to easily move past my designs, dismissing them as just items on a rack.
I want them to see the story and the techniques that go into creating my garments .” SWGT’s Prairie dresses in innovative hybrid fabrics made on handlooms are what made Shweta Gupta a hit at Indian fashion weeks . A proud girl of the mountains, her brand is dedicated solely to transforming how handlooms from the nooks and crannies of India have typically been represented.
You will find Chanderi from Madhya Pradesh and silks from Assam that are dyed, diced, spliced and fashioned into sleek suits, jackets and skirts for a modern audience. “Visiting these places and speaking to karigars who belong to these parts is integral to my design process. Their stories and the raw beauty of the landscapes inspire me,” she says.
Gupta left Almora to study at NIFT Gandhinagar in 2008, before settling in New Delhi where she worked at the ateliers of Gaurav Gupta , Tarun Tahiliani and Varun Bahl. She remembers visiting a NIFT campus with her grandfather on one of their trips and “finding the students super cool. It was a revelation that one could study design and make a career out of this”.
But it wasn’t Gupta’s formal education that formed her design sensibility of moulding sedate and librarian-style muted fabrics into whimsical pieces. She was weaned on Jane Austen , lived in a colonial-style wooden cottage with a sloping roof and woke every morning to a view of peony beds growing under tall pine trees. She would shop in a Tibetan market two hours away in Nainital and sketch Archies -themed greeting cards.
“Part of my wardrobe was all hand-me-downs from my cousins, like boxy T-shirts and caps,” she says. “Maybe that’s why I always leaned towards a more androgynous style.” Since starting her label in 2019, she has participated in trade shows including Who’s Next in Paris and showcased her designs at Indian fashion weeks, each time taking back a bigger roster of clients.
Her beautifully cut shirts and dresses have hidden French seams and are crafted in hybrid fabrics that she’s devised on her own, which had buyers in Paris awestruck. Gupta maintains that the mountains have always been her inspiration: “My eye for detail in life translates into the intricacies I work with at my design studio. For some, a tree may be just a tree, but for me, it’s the pattern it takes, the way its branches move, and so on.
Seeing and being able to spot the beauty in the mundane is a gift, in my opinion.” When Ashish Karmali arrived in New Delhi nine years ago with the hope of pursuing a career in fashion design, he didn’t know the difference between ready-to-wear and couture. The 27-year-old’s introduction to the world of handmade artistry came via watching his mother hunched over her beloved Pooja sewing machine, using old newspapers to cut patterns for sari blouses for herself and outfits for him.
“I still have some of the bright, colourful sweaters she knitted for me,” he says, crediting these memories with teaching him “why something made by hand is special”. Graduating in fashion design from NIFT New Delhi, Karmali began working for Gaurav Jai Gupta’s label Akaaro in 2019, followed by a short stint at Ashish in the UK, then at Eka, before finally going independent in 2022. Freelance assignments have seen him work with the likes of Bodice, Raw Mango and Byredo as an illustrator and a stylist.
In the short time since graduating, Karmali has hopped, skipped and jumped from one cool project to another with the ease of a seasoned hustler. “I am grateful that my destiny brought me to a world that helped broaden my vision and challenge my creativity,” he says. But it isn’t just destiny that has big brands on a waiting list to work with him.
Karmali’s creations are a fresh take on couture, minimising the use of sequins and focusing more on undefined silhouettes that take shape using ruffles and fabrics pinned and fastened following a pattern only his mind knows. It’s home that inspires these ideas, he says. “I grew up in a joint family with a strong matriarchal influence and the women of the house always inspired me.
They were always veiled and taking care of the family, with a quiet and resilient nature,” he explains, using a recent example of his designs, which is a take on the traditional ghoonghat. These studied explorations, which seem more like wearable art than just pretty outfits, landed him an offer to study at the prestigious fashion school, Central Saint Martins in London . He was also shortlisted for the MA Chanel scholarship by the British Fashion Council.
“Sometimes, I cannot believe that I have come so far—all the way from Ramgarh to presenting my work to a jury consisting of Sarah Mower , Grace Wales Bonner and Alexander Fury,” he says with a laugh. This story appears in Vogue India’s September-October 2024 issue. Subscribe here .
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