Irani Cafés & Art Deco Dreams: ASAII's Latest Collection Paints Bombay in Motion

I ran away from Mumbai barely a few months after moving there, back in 2019. I had arrived with hope in my eyes but was reeling from grief. “Mumbai has a lot to offer,” people told me over and over. I believed them. I had dreamt of moving there to work for legacy lifestyle publications. But I also knew I’d need grit to keep up with the city’s rhythm, but I just didn’t realise how much. In that low phase, I couldn’t see the beauty of Mumbai that others waxed eloquent about. All I could see was a city that never paused, and how I couldn't keep up with its pace.

Six years later, when I visited again, it finally made sense — the songs, the films, the mythos. I saw the version of Bombay that existed between glances exchanged in crowded trains, in the lull of the sea at Marine Drive, and or the comfort of digging into a keema pav at an Irani café. The version of Mumbai I couldn’t access before because I was at my lowest, met me now with quiet tenderness when I revisited it from a place of having healed. 

As if by some cosmic timing, I recently encountered fashion label ASAII’s latest collection, Bombay: Sheher-e-Kahani (City of Stories), that somehow precisely captures this in-between - the city’s poetic resilience, its hard contradictions, and the gentle magic that lingers in its everyday moments. A Goa-based slow fashion brand founded by Nimisha Bathla, ASAII has always been rooted in storytelling. Their clothes are not seasonal statements but personal narratives. They’ve previously transformed real memories — like riding pillion on a scooter with your father or diving into a lake in Udaipur — into hand-painted garments that feel as intimate as a diary. With Sheher-e-Kahani, they turned their gaze to the bustling cityscape of Bombay, while still holding space for the individual.

The collection is filled with quiet tributes to Bombay’s layered identity - from its Art Deco architecture and golden cinema halls to the dabbawalas, kaali-peelis, and local trains that pulse through the city’s veins. But ASAII doesn’t flatten these into clichés. Instead, their signature approach — simple silhouettes in neutral hues, layered with delicate brushwork — slows the city down. It invites you to linger on the details: the lines of a façade, the stillness before a film begins, and the choreography of catching a local train on time. Their collection note reads,

ASAII’s hand-painted garments aren’t loud or busy. They offer nostalgia and appreciation for the small moments in fragments — like glimpsing the remnants of something familiar in a puddle after rain. What makes the collection stand out is not just its visual vocabulary, but the way it balances Bombay’s sensory overload with space — both emotional and physical. Space to breathe, to feel, to belong.

There’s also a sense of duality woven throughout the collection — grandeur and grit, motion and pause, memory and moment. It acknowledges the city’s contrasts without romanticising them. In a shirt, you may find the Taj Hotel and Dharavi side by side. In a dress, you may recognise a man weaving through traffic with eggs balanced delicately on a bicycle. The Jaali shirt is a personal favourite for me - the way the patterns mimc the railings of local trains, and feature familiar images that add depth of lived experiences - voices raised in banter, songs born from strangers, hands reaching out just in time to catch the train. Each piece from the collection is a reminder of how stories lurk in the unnoticed, the quiet, and the ordinary.

Returning to Bombay after years allowed me to rewrite my relationship with the city — to finally see it not just as a place that tested me, but also as one that holds space for reinvention. In a way, ASAII’s Sheher-e-Kahani extends a similar call — to revisit, to reframe, to wear Bombay not as an emblem of hustle, but as the setting for a storied life filled with emotion, detail, and grace. Perhaps I wouldn’t have appreciated this collection if I hadn’t discovered it after the trip that helped reclaim the city, but it did. And now I reminisce about how it takes leaving and returning to truly see.

And sometimes, it takes wearable art like this collection from ASAII to keep holding steadfast to certain realisations.

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