Raw Mango’s London Fashion Week debut ‘It’s Not About The Flower’ challenged stereotypes about Indian couture while rethinking craft, cultural exchange, and the future of global fashion. In a post-LFW conversation with Homegrown, founder Sanjay Garg spoke about Indian couture, craft labour, and cultural appropriation.
For nearly two decades, Sanjay Garg has positioned Raw Mango at a curious intersection: between craft revival and contemporary design thinking, between heritage textiles and modern aesthetics. If Indian haute couture has often been defined internationally by heavy embroidery, ornate surfaces, and bridal spectacle, Raw Mango has steadily insisted on a different vocabulary where textiles, silhouette, colour, and material speak as loudly as ornate, intricate motifs and embellishments that have become synonymous with traditional Indian fashion. On 23 February 2026, Garg’s vision of Indian fashion debuted on the runway at London Fashion Week. The collection, titled ‘It’s Not About The Flower’, might seem at first glance like a modest conceptual shift — an exploration of the garland rather than the individual flower. But beneath that simple metaphor lay a broader proposition about Indian fashion itself: how it is seen, what it is reduced to, and what it might become. In conversation with Homegrown, the designer answered broader questions about cultural production, authorship, and the politics of craft labour.
The name ‘Raw Mango’ evokes something unripe, imperfect, and still in the process of becoming. Nearly two decades on, with international presentations and global collaborations, how do you relate to that metaphor today? Does the idea of “rawness” still shape how you think about the brand and its evolution?
My work is a part of an ongoing dialogue I have with myself, my curiosities. It’s a perspective that’s very much shaped by my personal expression, reflection on social issues, and our design philosophy. When we talk about the imperfect idea of beauty, this embodies my vision and journey. The questions we engage with don’t always come with neatly tied answers.
How can certain design elements be translated into Indian textiles? If I don’t like it, why is that? What are the challenges presented by a craft, and how can you design with that? Imagining what a textile’s future can look like? The creations that come from this process of constant back and forth, I think, are authentic to us and our experiences. That’s the beauty.
Your work draws from many cultural forms including music, dance, food, and textiles. When translating these layered traditions into fashion, how do you ensure they remain more than aesthetic references and retain their cultural specificity?
We don’t translate music into fashion. We create music. We create films. We host baithaks to enjoy everything from Haryanvi Ragni to Dadri and Thumri. We engage with these art forms and cultural traditions because I am interested in them. I see my role as more expansive than just designing fashion. I want to interest the larger republic in art, dance, and cultural exchange. We communicate in multiple layers at Raw Mango. The textile is a part of that story, but not the complete story itself. Textile is a medium of expression for me—one of many.
When it comes to retaining cultural specificity, I don’t agree with the way it is thought about these days. The history of craft and textile tells us that cultural exchange has always been a part of this world. So how do we measure where this culture’s influence on a creation stops, and that culture’s influence begins? All we can do is be authentic to our experience of it, and what we want to say about it. It stops being just an aesthetic reference, when we present a point of view on it.
Raw Mango collaborates with artisans across Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, and Varanasi. Could you speak about what those relationships look like in practice, both creatively and economically? More broadly, how do you think about balancing the aesthetic appreciation of textiles with the material realities of craft labour?
I believe that for textile crafts to survive, they require design intervention. Our textiles often involve 1-2 years of research, design and sampling before being made for the consumer. Throughout this, the weavers and stakeholders are present and the process is very much about possibilities on the loom — which they are the knowledge holders of. We are always thinking about the value we are adding. We make sure to look at our design contribution to the textile, not just its contribution to our work. What is the difference we are making for the industry, the weavers, the technique?
We engage with the visual vocabulary of India through measured interventions within traditional practices — be it design, material, tools, technique or color. One of our key design interventions has been to update — or modernize — the visual language within textile cultures. And those developments don’t just go away once a collection is done. Some of our interventions continue to define certain textiles.
You have often spoken about challenging the stereotype of Indian fashion as heavily embellished or maximalist. Your Fall/Winter 2026 collection ‘It’s Not About The Flower’, presented at London Fashion Week, centres the garland instead of the individual flower. Does this metaphor also reflect a broader idea about plurality in Indian culture, or about how Indian aesthetics are often reduced to singular legible and exportable motifs?
Yes, sometimes we limit our focus to the beauty that lives on the surface. Even in prints, heavy embroideries and large patterns — it’s the repetition of a single motif that creates the piece. With ‘It’s Not About The Flower’, we wanted to expand our focus to the garland instead of the single flower. The arrangement, instead of the singular disembodied motif. The weave and the structure, instead of the golden threads on the surface. The body, instead of the adornment. The united whole, instead of a single part. Every flower in a garland is unique, but at some point, each of them loses their individuality as they become part of something larger than themselves.
It’s not just pluralism; it’s also abundance. Look at how we interact with flowers in South Asian cultures. We don’t really have a culture of giving one individual flower to someone, like, say, a rose on Valentine’s Day. People do give but, as a culture, we are a country of garlands. Whether it’s a death, a birth, a wedding or a religious ritual, you see garlands, irrespective of the religion — there are more than enough flowers for everybody. It’s not about one individual flower.
Presenting at London Fashion Week inevitably situates the work within a global fashion framework shaped by certain expectations and historical perspectives on Indian design. How did you approach showing the collection in that context, and how do you navigate the tension between engaging a global audience and resisting those pre-existing narratives?
I don’t try to define my target audience, or what they think, or how I think they will react. I just do my work. Wherever we present, we’ve been graced with a great audience who are conscious of quality, have a strong view on design and a confident sense of self. So, whether the show happens in London or in Kanpur, the work is really what matters to us. And that doesn’t change according to who is viewing it, or where.
You have described Raw Mango as an ongoing dialogue with yourself. What does being a designer in India mean to you today? Do you think of yourself as an “Indian” designer? Consequently, being a designer who is also Indian, how do you feel about the question of cultural appropriation when Western ateliers such as Cartier or Prada “draw inspiration” from Indian craft traditions or erase an object’s Indian heritage altogether?
I don’t like the term “fashion designer” because my goal is not just to create fashion. I’d like to think of myself as a design thinker and contributor — to keep up and start conversations about not just the niche ‘fashion’ conversation but as ‘design, craft & culture’ — that encompasses textile, the human condition, socio-economic realities, design challenges and cultural touch points.
As for the conversation on inspiration, you want the honest answer? First thing we need to appreciate is that every single craft is a mix of many different languages, heritage, religion, geography, changing kingdoms et cetera. The geography of this world has changed so many times and it’s continuing to change. So it’s difficult to draw the line to say, this particular thing belongs to this part of the map, and that thing belongs to that part of the map. That’s not how cultural exchange has taken place across history.
Secondly, we must understand that when it comes to design or design IP, we are one of the worst offenders in using copied and counterfeit designs without giving credit. We do not like to give credit, and we do it every day. How many people know who designed the original idea of the sofa they are using. Who are the famous chair designers and sofa designers?
I think we should not take this too much to heart. Yes, it’s Kolhapuri; yes they didn’t mention it; fine, understood. But the lesson we want to teach them, can we first practice it ourselves?
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