Delhi-based designer Gaurav Khanijo’s recent collection ‘Memoirs of Gulbash’ pays tribute to the designer’s late uncle who was a source of encouragement and support throughout his life. The gender-fluid designs featured in the collection draw deeply from the personal history and cross-border cultural heritage of his grandfather’s migration from Pakistan to India during Partition and distil the essence of Khanijo’s agender, trans-seasonal approach to luxury fashion.

This approach carries over to and defines ‘Khanijo’, his eponymous brand of luxury clothes founded in 2014, which consistently explores the correlation between fashion and anthropology while preserving and honouring the craft of India’s traditional textile artisans. Khanijo’s designs take inspiration from the concept of biomimicry for material innovation and the use of indigenous handwoven textiles and natural fibres to create gender-fluid, trans-seasonal classics with timeless silhouettes and meticulous textures. Equal parts vintage, classic, and contemporary, Khanijo’s understated designs are an ode to a time before ready-to-wear clothes when all clothes were tailor-made for the wearer and the bespoke nature of personal style reflected both craftsmanship and culture.

Khanijo believes in reviving this artisanal and artisan-first approach to cloth-making and creating contemporary edits that are still rooted in South Asia’s diverse indigenous textile traditions. In the past, the designer has worked extensively with indigenous Indian textiles like khadi — a handspun and handwoven cotton fabric which became a symbol of India's freedom struggle during the Non-Cooperation movement  when Mahatma Gandhi called for the boycott of European machine-made clothes and the adoption of Swadeshi alternatives.

His current ‘Root’ and ‘Soul’ collections embody this return to the gender-agnostic origins of Indian men’s fashion with traditional silhouettes like Bandis, Kurtas, Bandhgalas, and Achkans in thoroughly modern pastel shades, and the flamboyant, fun sensibilities of turn-of-the-century circus aesthetics with high-waisted trucker pants in vibrant purple, red, and blue; flared, wide pants in pastel pink, green, and beige; as well as patterned and printed shirts.

At a time when a rapidly warming world is grappling with the ethical and ecological repercussions of a wasteful fast fashion industry that generates 92 million metric tonnes of textile waste every year and contributes to 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions annually, Khanijo represents a new generation of Indian designers who are confronting fashion’s obsessions with archaic notions of trends, seasons, and gender norms with a return to looser, layered silhouettes and fluid drapes that do not conform to the industry’s fixation with the binary of ideal male and female anatomies.

Follow Khanijo here.

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