How MOI And Kartik Research Are Reinterpreting Indian Handiwork For A Global Wardrobe

MOI Fine Jewellery and Kartik Research bring their work to New York this September, opening a joint dialogue around trade routes, craft lineages, and handcrafted objects. Their collaboration focuses on how traditional craft practices function in contemporary spaces. Meeting at the Kartik Research Manhattan location, both brands examine how regional practices exist within modern design without losing their history.

Kartik Research approaches design by taking inherited techniques and translating them into clothing for modern wardrobes. MOI, an India-based luxury jewellery brand, focuses on tracing the communities, rituals, and histories tied to those same techniques. While one brand builds garments around traditional physical processes, the other documents the lineages and cultural background that gave birth to the objects in the first place. The work resolves into a shared design element: handcrafted buttons using glass beadwork traditions for select Kartik Research jackets.

The geographic centre of this work is Kutch, a region in Western India with a long history of migration, trade, and cultural exchange. Over generations, diverse groups of people moved through Kutch, bringing different materials, tools, and ideas. The region became a regional hub where skills were passed down across families and towns. The local material culture reflects this continuous movement, showing how craft forms absorb outside influences while maintaining their original identity.

MOI has focused its research on the glass beadwork of Western India, specifically the practice known as motibharat. In Kutch, women have long practiced motibharat within their domestic routines, using basic glass beads, needle, and thread. Through patience and learned instincts, they constructed patterns and objects that served practical roles in daily living, while also acting as markers of community membership. The beadwork was never just decorative; it carried details about who made it, where they came from, and which community they belonged to.

In this collaborative project, MOI translates motibharat into functional buttons crafted for Kartik Research outerwear. This application brings traditional beadwork into contact with contemporary tailoring. A button made through hours of manual bead-stitching sits on a modern jacket, bringing fine jewellery making and garment design together. The resulting pieces display how traditional skills can find practical home ground inside modern garments.

This project addresses the practical realities of preserving heritage craft across India today. As mass production speeds up how people buy and discard things, traditional crafting methods face ongoing practical pressures. The collaboration examines what elements of a craft must be preserved as originally practiced, what elements can adapt to modern needs, and how designers can work directly with artisan communities. By placing motibharat on a jacket, both brands show that tradition remains active when people continue to make, wear, and adapt it.

The collaboration comes to life in New York City across two days in mid-September 2026. On September 18, MOI co-founders Kunal and Puja Shah join Kartik Kumra, founder of Karthik Research at their store in Manhattan. On September 19, MOI hosts a preview of its broader fine jewellery work at the same Manhattan venue. Visitors will get a look at MOI’s latest collections, including the Serai Collectibles line, which was previously shown during London Craft Week earlier in the year. The event introduces New York audiences to MOI’s wider approach to design, which balances traditional handiwork with clean forms.

MOI operates as a design-first brand built around the idea of craft without physical or cultural borders. The brand relies on master artisans across India who hold generations of practical knowledge. Puja Shah and her team describe themselves as jewellery geeks, focusing on gem selection, metalwork, and precise finishing. Beyond creating everyday jewellery pieces, MOI runs specialised research initiatives such as Unbound by Beads and the Collectibles series, which aim to document, preserve, and reintroduce traditional Indian techniques to new global audiences.

Kartik Research, founded by Kartik Kumra, works with traditional Indian artisans to make contemporary menswear. The brand centres its production around hand-loom fabrics, natural dyes, and regional hand-embroidery techniques, offering an alternative model to modern factory manufacturing.

By bringing their shared project to Manhattan, both brands extend a conversation about how contemporary designers can honor older methods of making. The handcrafted buttons, the archival research into Kutch beadwork, and the gathering in New York all point to the same practical goal: keeping regional Indian craft active, practical, and connected to the people who create it.

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