The Best of India’s SS25, Fresh Off International Runways

The Big Four in fashion just wrapped the Spring Summer 2025 season and India left its signature across London, Paris, NYC and Milan. From debut designers, mosaics of personal history, cosmic scale, and a playground of prints, this season belonged to Indian designers who challenged key international fashion destinations with their statement collections.

Juderic Braganza

London Fashion Week

Juderic Braganza, a Central Saint Martins graduate and Mumbai-raised fashion designer, made his London Fashion Week debut with a collection that pays heed to his family’s Goan immigrant history. Drawing from the women who built joy from scarcity, he reworked thrifted vintage pieces and end-of-mill fabrics into courageous, celebratory silhouettes. Skirts pieced from scraps, up-cycled party dresses all-night revelry—Braganza’s clothes are as resourceful and defiant as the women who inspired them.

Naeem Khan

New York Fashion Week

Naeem Khan took cues from Sicily’s Baroque architecture and Italy’s coastal landscapes, translated into flowing silhouettes, intricate embroidery, and a palette shifting from soft pastels to shimmering metallics and deep black. As the show neared its end, the lights turned emerald, unveiling a Wicked capsule in collaboration with Universal Studios—Elphaba green, Glinda pink, and all.

Priya Ahluwalia

London Fashion Week

Priya Ahluwalia’s collection, Home Sweet Home, pulls from the realities of migration, piecing together past and present through sharp tailoring and rich textiles. Traditional prints sit beside contemporary sportswear. Denim, jacquards, and knits redesign familiar motifs into something unmistakably new. A wardrobe shaped by movement, memory, and the places we call home.

Aarti Vijay Gupta

London Fashion Week

Aarti Vijay Gupta’s Postcard from Kashmir turns the valley’s landscapes and art into a textile diary. Hand-drawn prints map out saffron fields and shikaras; embroidery traces the curves of walnut wood carvings. Flowing tunics, hand-structured sets, and draped saris play with nostalgia without looking like pieces for a museum. Postcard from Kashmir wears like a lived-in keepsake.

Rahul Mishra

Paris Haute Couture Week

Rahul Mishra’s The Pale Blue Dot placed human existence under a microscope, referencing Hindu philosophy and Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Mirrors framed faces, embroidered landmarks seemed overtaken by nature, and birds broke free from bodysuits—each piece playing with perspective and scale. Gold arrived as the collection’s crescendo, draping utopian visions in embroidery: a deer curled up on a bed, glimpsed through a windowpane, a quiet scene set against the vastness of space.

Kanika Goyal

London Fashion Week

Kanika Goyal’s Playfield is movement in fabric—drapes unravel from rigid structures, childlike scribbles surface as embroidery, and ombré denim fades like a half-formed thought. Brutalist geometry meets loose, instinctive lines, a nod to Chandigarh’s architecture and the unfiltered joy of colouring outside the lines. Circularity drives the collection, from surplus-sourced cottons to re-wearable denim, designed to shift, change, and play.

Bibhu Mohapatra

New York Fashion Week

Bibhu Mohapatra’s collection crowned Patti Smith as its muse—not in style, but in spirit. Instead of reinterpreting her androgynous wardrobe, Mohapatra channelled her defiant creativity into striped jacquards, beaded tulles, and organza gowns. Mini shift dresses played against sweeping silhouettes, capturing the tension between structure and abandon.

Rocky Star

London Fashion Week

Rocky Star turned to pastels for Blush Éclat, a collection built on airy layers and light movement. Frills traced the edges of print-on-print florals, while embroidery slips in quietly, catching the light without fuss. Ivory and blush pink set the tone, broken up by streaks of midnight black—soft, but never too sweet.

Dhruv Kapoor

Milan Fashion Week

Dhruv Kapoor’s show at Milan Fashion Week opened inside an inflatable playhouse—red carpets, fluorescent haze, and a slouched toy rabbit sitting at the head of the ramp. Childhood and playfulness had already been established before the first model made it down the runway. In the collection, it found itself in abstract florals on suiting, punctured denim, bucket hats, and crinkled leather vests. Despite the innocent themes, Kapoor’s signature prints took on a far quieter, mature confidence in this collection.

Harikrishnan Keezhathil Surendran Pillai, aka HARRI

London Fashion Week

HARRI quite literally stretched latex to its limits. Back for a second season under the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN, the designer took over Old Selfridges Hotel with a spectacle that blurred the line between fashion and performance. Models moved in slow-motion sequences only to heighten the impact of ballooning jumpsuits, sculpted bodysuits, and zippered suits that warped and extended the human form. A restrained palette—black, khaki, burgundy, sheer green—kept the focus on shape, strain, and controlled distortion.