Bodice
Bodice is a clothing label from India that creates essentials from a cornucopia of textiles and history. It portrays a love for traditional crafts from a modern and contemporary point of view. Bodice was founded by Ruchika Sachdeva in response to an internal call to create high-quality, long-lasting clothes with textiles and crafts from Indian culture. It focuses on the essential over the abundant.
While the textbook definition of the Bodice clothing brand is the upper part of a modern dress, science of pattern- making defines it as the primary block with which everything begins. Bodice got its name by drawing upon that philosophy of “going back to one’s roots” and letting “form follow function.”
BISKIT
BISKIT is a unisex concept label that offers cerebral products designed with fabrics that are easy to care for. The sibling founders, Shruti and Harsha Biswajit are artists who use apparel as their creative expression. In essence, BISKIT was born in Brooklyn and now has its home in Madras, India, with an aesthetic that merges a Brooklyn vibe with the brand’s Indian background. BISKIT’s vision is to create a design studio at the intersection of fashion, art, design, and collaboration. Seeing how the clothing industry has long been shaped and categorized as menswear and womenswear, a BISKIT piece is designed to break the binary of gender.
In the process, they can focus on what matters — comfort, functionality, and sound design. With exciting collaborations ranging from product drops to installations, music to photography, and with creatives across the world, BISKIT has baked the ancient Indian philosophy of sharing into their products — they encourage not just buying less and wearing well but sharing with friends and family, because with a BISKIT product, you actually can!
Almost Gods
Everything about ALMOST GODS –– from the name of their collections to their story-telling –– is centered around art and applying it to everyday concepts to transcend commodities into items of desire. The independent fashion brand — which was started by Dhruv Khurana in 2018 and operates out of New Delhi — has received a lot of notoriety for its red, oversized drape hoodie. The brand’s product ideology aims at establishing “Indian Futurity.” Through their products, ALMOST GODS strives to broaden the conversation around what a clothing brand from India can create.
The name ALMOST GODS draws from the founder’s connection with the postmodernist ideology of leveling the playing field. This ideology allowed Khurana, a brown kid, to believe that he could influence the global zeitgeist the way culture shapers of color had done before. Whether stripping off jacquard fabrics from old couches for jackets or sourcing used Indian fabrics and upcycling them into shirts — resurrected fabrics give a second life to used materials. Each collection includes outerwear, T-shirts, shirts, pouches, hats, and even shoe laces.
KGL
KGL is an acronym for Kanika Goyal Label, a namesake menswear, womenswear, and accessories label started by Kanika Goyal in 2014. The brand aims to deliver intellectually designed, neo-luxury pieces suffused with sartorial cool. Celebrating a non-traditionalist point of view, the brand intends to deconstruct the rigid perception of tailoring. Architecture, explicitly intersecting shapes and the play of shadow and light, have regularly inspired the brand’s modernist take on color-blocking.
With a graduate degree in fashion design from India’s premier National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi, internships with powerhouses like Marchesa and Prada, and a subsequent degree at Parsons New York, Goyal fine-tuned her skills in all spheres of design. Both formal training and natural curiosity led her to evolve from a designer to a global couturier, obsessed with quality and detail. KGL is a distillation of all her influences and design philosophies. Her collections are euphoric, tailored, and often provocative. They’re built for today’s audience that prefers a gender-fluid, ready-to-wear style.
