The lack of Indian fashion subcultures and what really is 'Indian fashion' ?
So recently I came across a reel in my feed (cant post the link here) regarding the comet x farak collaboration and lets just say I had some disagreements with it.
In summary the topic of her reel was how Indian men should not fall for the western sneaker hype and instead should should wear things which authentically reflect their culture or background .i.e in this context the comet x farak collab which contains traditional embroidery details etc.
My disagreements with the reel were as follows
- It creates a false dichotomy:
- Western sneaker = trend-chasing, culturally disconnected
- Traditional embroidery on a sneaker = authentic Indian expression
- The irony is while the embroidery details may reference Indian craft traditions, but the silhouette itself exists within a design language heavily indebted to the bapesta which itself is an homage to the Air Force
- So if the critique is that Indian men are borrowing Western sneaker culture, promoting a derivative of a derivative while calling it “authentic” feels less like cultural confidence and more like aesthetic rebranding.
This made me think
"What actually makes fashion “Indian” today?"
Too often, contemporary Indian fashion gets reduced to a very export-friendly visual shorthand: handloom, embroidery, natural dye, vibrant color, visible craft. And while brands like Kartik Research and Kardo do genuinely beautiful work (I would love to own a lot of their pieces in my dream wardrobe), they often reflect a version of India that feels curated through an outsider’s lens ; one that treats Indian identity as heritage artifact rather than lived present.
That’s not because the craft isn’t real or valuable. It is. The problem is when this becomes the only accepted vocabulary for “Indian fashion.”
Most young Indians and honestly even much of our parents’ generation don’t experience their cultural reality through elaborate embroidery and artisanal nostalgia and this is not a shade on these brands but a failure of us as a society where we are very much disconnected from our traditions.
Much of western fashion traditionally can be rooted back to aristocracy and military traditions but it has evolved through Ivy, skateboarding, hip-hop, surf, workwear, Black culture, military surplus etc.
A more relatable example would be Japanese fashion which similar to Indian culture has a deep artistic tradition but has evolved through reinterpretation and obsessive subcultural refinement to a point where there exists a subgenre of fashion which despite its roots not being japanese is distinctively japanese.
India’s fashion identity still often skips contemporary lived culture and jumps straight back to heritage.Maybe that’s the real gap.
Not that Indians are “too Westernized.”But that we still haven’t fully built a modern design language rooted in who we actually are now.
What do u guys think ?