Swatch this space: Inside the archives of some of Indian biggest fashion labels

The early years are a precarious time for a fashion designer.

Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla were so strapped for cash, they couldn’t afford to keep a single piece from their early collections together, even though they knew they would one day wish they had.

“We had to sell everything we created. We didn’t even have the funds to keep master samples,” the designers say.

They would later track down some of those garments from the 1980s, borrow them from their owners, and replicate them, finally bringing at least a version of them back home.
Their archive is now one of the country’s richest repositories of contemporary fashion and textile history — part of a growing number of such storehouses of iconic pieces and copyrighted materials, swatches, sketches, photographs and know-how.
There are fashion archives attached to the labels of Rahul Mishra and Gaurav Gupta (who have shown at Paris Haute Couture Week since 2020 and 2023 respectively); Ritu Kumar and Sabyasachi Mukherjee; Tarun Tahiliani and the late Wendell Rodricks.
When the Mumbai fashion house Purple Style Labs (PSL) acquired the Rodricks label shortly after the designer’s death in 2020, the archive was considered one of the big draws.
In a bit of good news, young designers now have the wherewithal to get started in year one. Or at least year one of their current iterations.
Mishra didn’t preserve anything from his first collection, in 2006. He was too focused on building skill, visibility and brand. By the time he co-founded his label that same year, with wife Divya Bhatt Mishra, who is also a fashion designer, he knew better.
Archiving is now a priority, he says. The label is still too young to think about things like a retrospective, he adds, but it is being done with an eye on the future.
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Perhaps now is an apt time for such efforts, says Shefalee Vasudev, a fashion writer and editor-in-chief of the digital magazine The Voice of Fashion
“Until about the turn of the century, this was still a nascent industry in India,” Vasudev adds. “Now the footprint is becoming larger and labels are less derivative. As the history of Indian fashion lengthens its shadow, it has to be documented, as an industry as well as in terms of all the personal creations and innovations of various designers.”
It is perhaps worth noting that when cultural historians look back and ask, who did Beyonce wear at that event, or where was that sculpted silhouette first seen, the answer will involve an Indian designer, so it is that much more crucial to preserve these pieces of history — as brands around the world, from Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent to Gucci and Ermenegildo Zegna, have been doing for decades.
Payal Jain, who studied the archives of Dior, Chanel, Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent while at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in San Francisco (it has since moved to Los Angeles), was inspired to maintain a year-wise physical and digital catalogue of her work from the very first year, and it helped her showcase her 30-year career in a retrospective recently, she says.
Tahiliani had documented his work copiously too, even if he only formally organised it as an archive in 2020, when his label turned 25. Over four years, his company has built that archive into a carefully curated, indexed and searchable repository that is rich in history, range and detail.
At its heart is a set of 22 glass-fronted cupboards that hold 7,000 pieces. They sit in a fireproof, temperature-controlled, restricted-access room. Our own TT-Wikipedia, head of the archive Gurvinder Kaur Gundev calls it.
Still, hundreds of master swatches have been lost, Gundev says. There aren’t even photographs of them, let alone samples. “That means we will never be able to recreate them, or preserve any of the knowledge or craftsmanship that came out of creating them all those years ago. Some things are simply lost to time; there is nothing one can do.”
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Today, when one has the choice of preserving almost everything, deciding what to keep and what to relinquish to time can be tricky too.
This is where experts such as Pramod Kumar KG, co-founder and head of the Delhi-based Eka Archiving, come in. His archiving consultancy has worked with brands such as Tahiliani, Anokhi and FabIndia.
Not everything can or should be saved; it all takes up expensive real estate, especially since fashion artefacts must be stored in a certain way, given space to breathe and protected from the elements, he says.
A well-built archive is one that serves as a source of identity and pride, documents a brand’s evolution, captures the designer’s vision and inspiration, and helps preserve continuity. It helps train new designers and recreate classics, allows old designs to be easily retrieved, recreated, showcased or worn again. It also helps preserve knowledge — of craftsmanship, technique, fabrics, ideas and approaches.
It allows a legacy to endure, KG says, as ownership changes hands and new generations of designers and administrators take over.
What sits in the archives of some of India’s biggest fashion houses? How are they organised, cared for, and run? Take a look.
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Rahul Mishra : On storing sculpted visions
There is a 5,000-sq-ft space in Rahul Mishra’s studio that is temperature-controlled, sealed to outside light, and protected with biometric-enabled access.
It is where most of the work he has done in the last 10 years is stored.
There are sketches here and unused embroidered fabric, textile swatches and, of course, entire garments. Preserving the garments is no easy feat, given that Mishra is known for his sculptural creations. Indexing is crucial, to prevent boxes being disturbed or opened unnecessarily.
“Ideally we’d need 10 times the space to be able to store everything,” he says, laughing.
The items that go into the archive are carefully selected, to represent an idea and a collection.
“Every season, we produce about 100 different designs, so it’s not possible to preserve everything,” says Mishra, 44. “We instead try to have something to represent each idea, including details of fabric used, embroidery done, measurements and more.”
Rahul Mishra co-founded his label in 2006, with his wife Divya Bhatt Mishra, 41, who is also a fashion designer. He hadn’t preserved anything from the work he had done before then. So here, from year one, the archiving began.
Which makes sense, given the strides Mishra has already taken. He has shown at Paris Haute Couture Week (PHCW) for eight seasons so far, and is one of only three Indians to show there at all, in 51 years.
His clothes have been worn by Zendaya, Selena Gomez and Gigi Hadid, by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan at an Ambani wedding celebration.
One of the most treasured pieces in his archive, in fact, is the first piece he ever showed at PHCW, in 2020: a leaf jacket worn by Zendaya at a Bulgari event later that year..
“But the value of the archive is not about which celebrity has worn a piece,” says Mishra. “Rather, it is about the moment in which it is created and what inspiration can be drawn from it. So there are many samples in the archive that have not seen the light of the runway but are still priceless additions. They also help maintain a chronological order to your evolution as a designer.”
Garments usually end up in the archive a year or two after they are created. After showing at Paris Fashion Week, new collections travel around the world for celebrities to wear and for press coverage, before they return to Mishra’s headquarters in Noida. These are pieces from the parts of his collection that are never sold.
What’s missing from the archive still hurts though, Mishra adds. The first garments he ever showcased, in 2006, for instance, took handwoven fabrics from Kerala, traditionally used to make mundus, and turned them into tunics, dresses and palazzo pants. It was a collection that won him several awards and kickstarted his career.
“It’s what got me a scholarship to study at the Istitiuto Marangoni in Milan and shaped the designer I am today,” he says. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a single piece from that collection with me today.”
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‘It’s like our very own Tarun Tahiliani Wikipedia’: Read an interview with the keeper of the TT archive
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Wendell Rodricks: When the line lives on
When the Mumbai fashion house Purple Style Labs (PSL) acquired the Wendell Rodricks label shortly after the designer’s death in 2020, the archive and manufacturing unit (both in Goa) were a big draw.
The brand now works with the same network of craftsmen and tailors, to put together ready-to-wear collections under the Wendell Rodricks label. The artisans often visit the archive for inspiration, says PSL founder Abhishek Agarwal, 35.
In the archive are the Kunbi saris made using the Goan weave that Rodricks helped revive, original sketches, pieces featuring his signature colour-blocking, and iconic designs from renowned collections seen on runways, on celebrities and in magazines, dating back to his first collection in 1989.
These include the first cutout of Rodricks’s iconic Palace Balcony Choli created for the 2011 Taj Calendar. “His vision is evident in this piece through its intricate craftsmanship that forms the outline of the remarkable Taj Lake Palace, Jaipur,” says Agarwal..
In February this year, the label used the archive to recreate a number of iconic items from Rodricks’s oeuvre, and launched a capsule collection as an ode to the late designer.
These included an off-white satin top-and-shorts set that his muse Malaika Arora wore in a 1995 shoot; a one-shouldered dress worn by Bipasha Basu at the first-ever Lakmé Fashion Week in 2000; and a Grecian sari gown worn by Lisa Ray at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2005.
“We acquired the brand to take the designer’s vision forward and to keep his timeless aesthetic alive. The archive helps us do that,” Agarwal says.
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Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla : Two time travellers’ tales
They met in 1986. Less than a year later, Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla had opened their first boutique store together. Called Mata Hari, it was an instant success. Actors Dimple Kapadia and Jaya Bachchan and the socialite-philanthropist Parmeshwar Godrej were early customers.
But these were still tough times.
“In our first few years we had to sell everything we created, since we didn’t have the funds to keep master samples and create an archive,” the designers say.
They have come a long way since, of course. In their archive now are signature pieces featuring chikankari and zardozi that have been worn by the likes of actor Judi Dench and popstar Beyonce.
After a few years of flourishing, the duo began to slowly build an archive. They went through the rather painful process of tracking down some early garments, borrowing them from their owners, and documenting and replicate them for the archive and archival catalogue.
“We now have a dedicated space that contains a magical collection of our work, from cholis and stoles to ensembles in zardozi, chikankari, mirror work and raw silk, from anarkalis to saris and lehengas to menswear such as kurta-pyjamas, bandhgalas and sherwanis,” they say..
Four of these pieces were displayed at the India in Fashion exhibition that marked the opening of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in Mumbai last year.
These included a signature architectural coat from 1990 inspired by the Purana Quila in Delhi. It took 48 karigars a total of 4,500 man hours to create the three-dimensional embroidery in raw silk on pure chamois satin — all quilted to give the effect of gates opening onto a palace. The mirrorwork ghagra worn by Madhuri Dixit-Nene in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2002 film Devdas. The chikankari farshi and dupatta with badla kurti created as a master sample in 2005. And a zardozi Anarkali produced between 1993 and 2009.
Items are selectively lent out, and have been shown at institutes such as the UK’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
The archive is now added to as often as possible, the designers say.
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Payal Jain : A time capsule of couture, pret, home
In November, Payal Jain celebrated 30 years as a fashion designer, with a retrospective show at a farmhouse just outside Delhi.
For it, she created 30 all-white sculptural outfits that represented the arc of her work. She combined wood, metal and paper with yarn made from jute and bamboo fibre, added sequins, bobbins, buttons, beads, fasteners and thimbles.
The 30 pieces told the story of how her work has shifted towards minimalism and a focus on textures. It’s a shift that became apparent to her as she scanned her archive in preparation for the show, says Jain, 53.
“Going through the archive helped me realise how my work has changed over time, even while my philosophy stayed the same,” she says..
Her collections include lines of couture, prêt-à-porter, home and corporate design. Using traditional textiles, she creates contemporary dresses and pant suits, among other Western silhouettes. Her archive, representing a wide range of appeal, through an era of particularly dramatic socio-economic and cultural change in India, thus captures some of the change that Indian fashion has undergone too.
Over the decades, her clothes have been worn by Victoria Beckham, Priyanka Chopra and Saina Nehwal. But her grandest achievement, Jain says, is when she gets orders from a second generation of clients.
That is gratifying and meaningful. It also tells her she has her finger on the pulse.
It is important to invent, reinvent, rediscover, Jain says. “How are you going to be able to do any of that if you have no tangible record of what you’ve already done?”