In Conversation with Taneesha Adlakha: Luxury is better shared

Luxury’s oldest promise has always been exclusivity. Its newest one? Flexibility. As wardrobes become more fluid and occasion dressing more intentional, the conversation is quietly moving away from What do you own? to What did you wear? In a market once defined by possession, access is beginning to look like the ultimate privilege.

And why buy a dream you’ll wear ONCE when you can wear many (and not have to break the bank)? Luxury has always been in the business of desire. But desire no longer ends at ownership alone right? Increasingly, it ends at the perfect entrance, the perfect photograph and the perfect evening (after posting, of course). The modern luxury consumer isn’t collecting couture as much as they’re collecting moments and that subtle shift is giving rise to a new economy where access is every bit as aspirational as acquisition.

In Conversation With Taneesha Adlakha

Luxebook: Luxury is built on exclusivity. Why should people start sharing it?

Taneesha Adlakha, Founder of SWRL: Because exclusivity was never really about owning the bag, it was about access to a certain world. What’s changed is that access no longer has to mean ownership. When someone rents a Sabyasachi or Mahima Mahajan for a wedding instead of buying it and wearing it once, they’re not diluting luxury, they’re actually using it the way it was designed to be used: to make a moment feel special. We built SWRL because we noticed the real exclusivity people wanted wasn’t “I own this,” it was “I got to wear this.” Sharing luxury rental doesn’t kill the dream. It just makes the dream sharable instead of debt-able.

Luxebook: What’s the biggest myth about fashion rentals that you’d love to bust?

Taneesha Adlakha, Founder of SWRL: That renting or buying preloved means “used” or “less than.” India especially still has a stigma around secondhand and rental fashion, like it’s a compromise you make instead of the real thing. But every single bag or outfit we put out is authenticated, condition-checked, and often comes with a story it has lived. The myth we hear most is “renting designer bags in India isn’t safe” when actually, the real risk is buying a fake for full price off some reseller with zero verification. We’d love people to understand: renting isn’t the backup option. It’s often the smarter option.

Luxebook: Which designer or category is unexpectedly the most in demand on SWRL?

Taneesha Adlakha, Founder of SWRL: Honestly, elevated contemporary luxury brands like Nadine Merabi and Meshki. When I was starting out, everyone told me to fixate on Indian designer labels because of how massive the wedding industry is here and don’t get me wrong, that’s still our biggest category. But what nobody prepared me for was how fast these brands would take off. I studied in the UK and was a personal shopper for three years before this, and Nadine Merabi was always a client favourite there. When I started SWRL, I only had a couple of pieces from my own wardrobe to begin with. People started renting them for birthdays, cocktail nights, youngster’s nights out occasions that aren’t “one big day, ” just people wanting to feel incredible for a night.

Looking back, I think a big part of why this took off is accessibility. These brands just weren’t easily available in India. Self Portrait has since landed on Ajio Luxe, but for most of these labels, access is still genuinely low you either travel, ask someone abroad, or you don’t wear it at all. Making fashion more accessible was one of the core reasons we started SWRL in the first place, and this is exactly that mission playing out in real time people getting to wear brands they’d otherwise have almost no way of reaching. And then it started showing up in the culture in a way I didn’t expect Palak Tiwari was spotted in a Meshki Adoria dress and a Self Portrait rhinestone dress via SWRL, Mouni Roy in De La Vali, Krithi Shetty and Anjini Dhawan in the Nadine Merabi Olivia and Phoebe sets, respectively. Seeing pieces we curated show up on people like that it told me we’d found a gap nobody else was serving.

Luxebook: Have you noticed Gen Z valuing access over ownership? How is that shaping the business?

Taneesha Adlakha, Founder of SWRL: Completely and it’s not even subtle. Gen Z customers on SWRL aren’t asking “should I buy this bag one day, ” they’re asking “can I have it for the weekend. ” Ownership isn’t the flex anymore, the experience is. It’s shaping the business in a real way: we’re building around outfit rotation and short-term access, not long-term acquisition. It’s also why we think fashion rental and reselling in India isn’t a niche, it’s basically where an entire generation’s spending habits are heading.

Luxebook: What’s been the toughest challenge in building trust in India’s luxury resale and rental market?

Taneesha Adlakha, Founder of SWRL: Authenticity, hands down. India doesn’t have the same established resale infrastructure that markets like the US or UK have had for decades there’s no “everyone knows this platform is legit” muscle memory yet. Every customer’s first question is some version of “how do I know this is real. ” We’ve had to build that trust brick by brick, transparent authentication processes, clear pricing, real condition photos because in this category, one bad experience with a fake product kills trust for years, not months.

Luxebook: What’s one customer story that made you think, “This is exactly why we built SWRL”?

Taneesha Adlakha, Founder of SWRL:One that’s stayed with me is a customer who was going through a marriage breakdown, raising two kids on her own, with money tight enough that spending on herself wasn’t even on the listanymore. She started sharing pieces from her own wardrobe on SWRL and what she earned from it was enough to fund a getaway she’d been desperately needing. She wrote to us afterward: “Thank you for building a platform which is helping us end consumers get back the power. Times have been tough on my personal end, but thanks to SWRL I was able to earn from my wardrobe and take the vacation I’d been waiting for.” That message is the whole reason SWRL exists, honestly. We didn’t set out to just make renting and buying prelo easier for the person borrowing the outfit we wanted to give people a way to unlock value sitting in their own closets, especially when life doesn’t leave room for anything else. Reading that, at a moment when spending on herself felt impossible, she found a way to give herself something she needed that’s not a transaction to me. That’s the mission working.

Luxebook:  If you could convince every luxury shopper to change just one habit, what would it be?

Taneesha Adlakha, Founder of SWRL: Stop buying for a single moment. So much luxury spending in India happens around one wedding, one event, one photo and then the piece sits in a cupboard for three years. I’d want people to ask “do I need to own this, or do I need to wear this once, really well” before they buy. That one shift in thinking from ownership to access is basically the entire reason rental and resale exist. But I’d take it a step further: start seeing your wardrobe as an investment, not just a closet. Buy pieces that hold value, that you can resell or rent out later, instead of pieces that only make sense for one night. Your wardrobe shouldn’t just cost you money it should be able to give some back, whether that’s through resale value or through renting it out yourself. Once people start thinking of luxury pieces that way, buying becomes a smarter decision, not just an emotional one.

Luxebook:  What’s next for SWRL?

Taneesha Adlakha, Founder of SWRL: Right now, we’re only fully operational in Delhi NCR but the demand coming in from Mumbai and even tier 2 cities has honestly caught us off guard. We’re facilitating a lot of those requests manually over WhatsApp for now, because we’d rather do it right than do it fast. Scaling quality control and authentication across a new city isn’t something you can shortcut, so we’re expanding deliberately, city by city, making sure trust doesn’t get diluted the moment we grow.

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Somewhere between the investment bag and the one night only gown, luxury found itself with an irony problem. The pieces commanding the highest price tags often enjoy the shortest lives outside the wardrobe. Today’s most discerning consumers are beginning to question that equation, embracing access over accumulation and rewriting what luxury ownership really means. So, is the future of luxury hanging in your wardrobe, or someone else’s?

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