Lakmé Fashion Week x FDCI 2026 in Mumbai: What worked and what didn’t

It may be time to admit that Lakmé Fashion Week x FDCI runs as much on institutional memory as on momentum. The 2021 merger, intended to consolidate resources and sharpen relevance, has brought scale — but not always clarity. What emerges is a platform in constant self-reinvention, still uncertain of its core identity.

The biannual event is held primarily in Mumbai, with some editions in New Delhi, showcasing Summer-Resort and Winter-Festive collections. The March 2026 edition, held from March 19 to 22 at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai, reflected this tension— ambitious in scale, yet still searching for sharper definition.

AKlOK
| Photo Credit:
Shivamm Paathak/Viduushi Guupta Paathak

Behind the scenes, the ecosystem has grown denser, if not necessarily more efficient. Publicists move in overlapping circles — sometimes representing designers, sometimes sponsors, and occasionally even one another — creating a hum of activity that is difficult to disentangle. There are, as ever, scores of young models, many of them hopeful to the point of endurance, navigating castings that can feel both crowded and curiously selective, with the same few faces often securing the most visible slots. It lends the proceedings a sense of repetition, even as the surface suggests churn.

Péro
| Photo Credit:
Viduushi Guupta Paathak

The presence of brands, meanwhile, is no longer peripheral but structural. Their role in sustaining the week is undeniable; they keep the lights on, quite literally, and enable a scale of production that might otherwise be untenable. Yet their influence raises the question of how much they shape, rather than support, what is ultimately shown. In the latest edition — spanning over 35 shows — there were moments of clarity, collections that managed to cut through the ambient noise and assert a distinct point of view. But these felt like exceptions rather than the prevailing mood.

Menswear set the tone

If there was a throughline to this season, it emerged most clearly through menswear — measured, craft-led, and, at its best, assured.

Kartik Research
| Photo Credit:
Manan Sheth

A significant marker came with Kartik Research, which staged its first-ever runway show in India. Founded by Kartik Kumra in 2021, the label has built its reputation on restoring a sense of humanness to clothing, with handloom textiles, intricate embroideries, and close collaborations with artisans forming its backbone. Drawing from subcultural references that span the optimism of the 1960s to India’s Indo-modernist art movements, the collection felt like a homecoming, anchored in familiar textile languages such as Bhujodi khadi, Rabari embroidery, and hand knitting from Almora, yet presented with a global ease. It is safe to say that there will be a lot of excitement surrounding the brand’s future shows.

Kartik Research
| Photo Credit:
Manan Sheth

Elsewhere, designers including Countrymade, Dhruv Vaish, Sahil Aneja, and Vivek Karunakaran explored modern menswear through craft — kantha, appliqué, and raw silks reworked into contemporary silhouettes. Also, Circular Design Challenge Winner CRCLE’s collection examined the relationship between material, maker, and wearer in menswear that was polished and cool, underpinning the label’s commitment to thoughtful construction, reinforcing a slower, more considered approach to menswear.

CRCLE by Varshne
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

Sahil Aneja
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

Countrymade
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

There were other highlights too: Anamika Khanna’s AK|OK presented menswear that moved through a restrained palette with ease, while Triune offered a travel-ready wardrobe of fluid tailoring and relaxed separates. At Line Outline, Deepit Chugh translated urban grids into garments marked by raw edges and wear.

Start to finish

At Lakmé Fashion Week x FDCI, the opening and closing shows did much of the heavy lifting in what was otherwise an uneven season. Anamika Khanna began on a measured note, offering a more minimal reading of her typically maximal vocabulary with her AK|OK showcase, while Aneeth Arora for Péro closed with Out of Office, a collection (67 looks and nearly 300 individual pieces) that reframed the mundanity of work as a meditation on escape.

AKlOK showcase by Anamika Khanna
| Photo Credit:
Pal Pillai

AKlOK
| Photo Credit:
Shivamm Paathak/Viduushi Guupta Paathak

Anamika’s strength lay in restraint. Her focus was on garments that invited styling rather than dictated it — draped dhoti pants, ruffled asymmetric tops, relaxed co-ords, and fluid gowns that moved easily between occasion and everyday wear. There was confidence in the construction, with silhouettes that prioritised comfort, suggesting a wardrobe built as much for repetition as for impact.

pero
| Photo Credit:
Viduushi Guupta Paathak

Péro, by contrast, leaned into narrative without sacrificing lightness. Out of Office carried a sense of release—the familiar thrill of stepping away from routine — translated into clothes that felt buoyant even when gesturing towards fatigue or burnout. Working within a restrained palette of white and blue, Aneeth layered patchwork, texture, and handwork with a practiced ease. There were moments where the embellishment felt slightly overworked or the styling a touch heavy, but these were fleeting.

pero
| Photo Credit:
Viduushi Guupta Paathak

What remained was a collection — and a finale — that understood mood. Between Anamika’s composure and Aneeth’s whimsy, Lakmé Fashion Week x FDCI found its clearest voice at both the beginning and the end.

The afterthought

Even a designer of Rahul Mishra’s calibre could not entirely escape the season’s unevenness. His showcase, called White Gold and presented under the AFEW umbrella, brought together many of the elements that have long defined his practice, more prominently, a commitment to hand embroidery as both technique and narrative.

AFEW by Rahul Mishra

The collection drew from the ecology of cotton itself, as the show’s sponsor, Supima, may have dictated. Motifs of buds, florals, and insects along with references to companion crops like marigold and mustard attempted to map the agricultural realities behind the textile, grounding the work in a broader, almost pastoral context. There was also a material intelligence at play, moving between the lightness of ek naliya weaves and the density of kadhwa techniques, balancing delicacy with structure.

AFEW by Rahul Mishra
| Photo Credit:
Shivamm Paathak

And yet, for all its conceptual and artisanal depth, the collection struggled to translate on the runway. The usual sense of drama and finish that one associates with Rahul felt muted, as though the pieces had not quite been given the time or space to fully resolve. It is not that the clothes lacked craft — on the contrary, they remained more polished than much else shown over the four days — but they lacked conviction in presentation.

Amit Aggarwal’s Orizon arrived with the promise of a dialogue between material innovation and cultural memory. Conceived in collaboration with jewellery label Indriya, the showcase set out to frame heritage through a contemporary lens, pairing polki and diamond jewellery with the designer’s signature vocabulary of handloom textiles, vintage Benares weaves, and engineered surfaces.

Amit Aggarwal’s Orizon
| Photo Credit:
Shivamm Paathak

On paper, the alignment was compelling. Amit’s work has long thrived on the interplay between tradition and futurism, and the idea of grounding that language in jewellery rooted in Indian craft could have yielded something layered, even expansive.

In execution, however, the balance felt uneven. The jewellery, inevitably, took precedence, its presence amplified to the point where the clothes (still structural and deftly manipulated) receded into the background. What might have been a conversation became, instead, a hierarchy. The garments — often the site of Amit’s most interesting explorations — appeared to orbit the accessories rather than hold their own against them.

Disha Patni for Amit Aggarwal
| Photo Credit:
Shivamm Paathak

It is here that the constraints of sponsorship became most visible. The collection did not lack intent, but it seemed, at moments, to be negotiating too many expectations at once. And in that negotiation, the designer’s voice felt partially subdued, as though the horizon it proposed was shaped as much by external demands as by internal vision.

GenNext came through

The GenNext shows remain fashion week’s most telling register. The collections, over the years, have been sometimes uneven, occasionally overworked, but anchored in conviction. This year, the ideas were assured, even if a tighter edit might have lent the clothes greater clarity.

Saim
| Photo Credit:
Viduushi Guupta Paathak

Jubinav Chadha’s A Postcard From Valley of Flowers explored how landscapes are increasingly encountered through screens. Drawing from Uttarakhand’s flora, he translated digital impressions into tactile craft — quilted terrains, embroidered floral stamps, and vintage postcard prints. His use of basket-weaving techniques to map latitudes and longitudes added a thoughtful, if slightly literal, dimension to the narrative of travel and memory.

Jubinav Chadha
| Photo Credit:
Viduushi Guupta Paathak

Taarini Anand’s On Restoration turned to the Ajanta caves, framing preservation as an ongoing act rather than a fixed point in time. Through hand-knitting, layered textures, and a palette drawn from weathered frescoes, she built garments that felt both archival and contemporary.

Taarini Anand
| Photo Credit:
Viduushi Guupta Paathak

Saim Ghani’s label, Saim, making its debut, approached mythology through the lens of memory. Referencing temple sculptures and his upbringing in Kolkata, he created fluid, sculptural silhouettes that balanced sensuality with restraint. Silk Chanderi, patchworks, and jewellery-inspired embellishments lent the collection a certain theatricality, though it occasionally bordered on excess.

Side note

If there is one area where the Lakmé Fashion Week x FDCI showcase continues to falter, it is in its approach to the body itself. Diversity, though frequently invoked, remains sporadic on the runway — visible in flashes, but rarely sustained. The underlying message, however unintended, is difficult to ignore: that certain bodies are still treated as the norm, while others are accommodated, occasionally, as an aside.

This is not merely a question of casting, but of design. When inclusivity is integral, it shapes silhouette, proportion, and construction from the outset; when it is not, it tends to appear as a late adjustment, and the clothes carry that hesitation.

Technology, meanwhile, made its presence felt in a more immediate way. The collaboration between Ray-Ban and Meta — their camera-enabled smart glasses, already in circulation globally — found eager adopters among influencers and attendees. On paper, the integration makes sense: a seamless way to capture and share the immediacy of fashion week. In practice, it introduced a more complicated dynamic.

Unlike a phone, which makes its presence know the moment it is raised, these glasses operate with a degree of subtlety that blurs the line between observation and recording. For those at the receiving end, it is not always clear when they are being filmed, or by whom, and consent becomes, at best, implied and, at worst, absent altogether. In a space already attuned to visibility — where being seen is both currency and condition — this near-frictionless recording can feel like surveillance.