A year ago Kartik Kumra became the first Indian designer to appear on the Paris men’s schedule. A season ago, in June, he staged his first runway show. Yesterday, he launched his first book for the label at a presentation of his fall collection. Not bad for a 24-year-old.
Being the “first” at anything is no small feat, but in Kumra’s case, it comes with its own set of challenges, most of which arise from the usual expectations tied to being an “other.” What makes him such a compelling talent to watch is not that he is unfazed by any of this, but that he seems to have assimilated the particulars of his position and sunk his feet deep into the ground.
Last season Kumra spoke about thinking more expansively now that his label is a vehicle for Indian storytelling on a global stage. The idea was to step away from the expected, the overly nostalgic and wanderlust-y, and instead offer a real point of view. (To put it plainly: less of India as packaged for Western consumption.) Kumra never had an issue with that, it must be said; his clothes have always had the kind of soul most Western labels pay good money to replicate. But with his book, titled Amdavad (as in Ahmedabad, the city in Western India), Kumra managed to give his designs both context and gravitas.
Styled by Julie Ragolia and photographed by Jeremy Everett, the images in the book show this collection in both the streets of Ahmedabad and inside one of its architectural gems, a residence commissioned to Le Corbusier in the early ’50s called Villa Shodhan, a recent discovery of Kumra’s. “It was cool to explore, and I’m also actively researching this stuff as well, so it’s also a new experience for me,” he said at his presentation. The use of the famous architect’s space, together with street shots of both models and the city’s residents, replicates Kumra’s own status as both at home anywhere in the world and as a perpetual outsider. Familiar but also completely different—such is the returning immigrant experience. Similarly, what you see in this look book is the beauty of Kumra’s remarkable fabrics meeting a global outlook on menswear in cropped bombers, chore jackets, anoraks, overcoats. “People should be able to wear these clothes,” he said with a dose of pragmatism.
There’s also what Kumra calls “the lost art of the weird suit.” These standout sets are his response to having procured a couple of archival early ’90s styles by Yohji Yamamoto and early 2000s pieces by Comme des Garçons. But they’re not avant garde, just different. “Like when suits were about style and not function or uniform,” he said. They’ll be a hit in New York. On that subject: Kumra is opening a shop stateside in the coming months. “We don’t need to overextend ourselves, so we did not do a show and just a presentation this season,” he said, perhaps forgetting he had just walked through the making of a book and his new retail destination.
