Table of contents for March-April 2026 in VOGUE India

Many years ago at a fashion magazine party in Delhi, I spotted a journalist turned author whose work I admired. His debut novel had affected me at such a fundamental level, I remember becoming an angrier person the week I was reading it. Mustering up the courage to admit this to him, I walked over and introduced myself. He accepted the accolades and indulged me in small talk about preferred literary genres.Then, he said, “I’m surprised you read about politics, I didn’t think this would interest you fashion types.” That interaction taught me two important lessons. One, heroes are human—and the truth of them is often more disappointing than the fiction you’ve written in your head. And two, even the smartest people misunderstand fashion. And by extension, the community that’s…

Sunshine streams through soft, white almond blossoms that dot the orchard I’m standing in. An orchestra of birds chirrup and in the distance, a glacial brook gurgles. Above, hawks ride the wind thermals, looping through the air. Almost reading my thoughts, Rigzin Lachic says, “You know those soundtracks they play in fancy spas when they tell you to close your eyes and relax? That’s what a regular day in Ladakh sounds like.” The owner of Dolkhar, a boutique hotel in Leh, tells me that after corporate stints in Japan and New Delhi, this picturesque landscape is what called her back to launch a small hotel and restaurant that has since been featured on Time’s 2023 list of the World’s Greatest Places. When Ladakh opened for tourists in 1978, all of…

Stepping out of my London hotel, I found myself frozen in my tracks, facing the wide glass frontage of the department store Harvey Nichols. I had expected the familiar grammar of luxury retail: mannequins frozen mid-gesture, campaign faces enlarged to abstraction. Instead, drawings darted across the glass—Jacky Blue’s sketches animated on screen, stretched beyond scale, rendered in thick, confident strokes that simultaneously had a doodle-like charm. I was not new to the vocabulary of illustration. Fashion did not enter my life through proximity. It arrived obliquely, through cinema. Audrey Hepburn led me to Givenchy and Dior, and from there to Edith Head. What stayed were not only the finished garments, but the drawings that preceded them. I sketched obsessively through my years of science education, mostly in the margins of…

By the time Krishna Malani, a Mumbai-based architect, reaches her third site visit of the day, her favourite fragrance, Chai de Robert Piguet, has morphed into comfort. What lingers, she says, smells “the way my mother’s kitchen felt at five in the evening”. Tea leaves. Cardamom in the air. Something to cut through all the site noise. “It keeps me sane when everything else is concrete and dust.” For a growing number of people, fragrances are shifting from a declaration of who you are to holding onto how something once felt—or how you want to feel again. In Barcelona, financial analyst Tina Bathija reaches for Massimo Dutti’s Solar Linen, a dry, sun-warmed fragrance, on days filled with review calls. “It smells like sheets drying on my grandmother’s terrace back home,”…

Amitava Saha Photographer, ‘Mind the cap’, page 194 What’s your unpopular opinion regarding fashion? Chasing every micro-trend feels exciting, but it dates you quickly. A clean shirt, well-cut trousers and a solid shoe don’t shout for attention, they just stay relevant, year after year. A Mumbai-based photographer, Amitava Saha has honed his craft while exploring style, identity and visual storytelling. Diya Colaço Illustrator What is a fashion hill you are willing to die on? In a world that values constant consumption and is forgoing artistic traditions in favour of machines, craft is the only real luxury. Nothing can replace the human touch; it’s what makes art meaningful. Diya Colaço is a visual designer and illustrator whose practice explores the culmination of craft, culture and contemporary visuals. Avani Rai Photographer, ‘Emerald…

It all started with a wild goose chase in Banaras (Varanasi),” recalls Swati Agarwal. One half of the label Swati & Sunaina Gold, the designer traces the brand’s origin story back a decade ago when, inspired by her Marwari family’s trove of heirloom saris, she set out to find a rangkaat (a complex weaving technique that interlocks silk with zari threads) drape for her brother’s wedding. The search was obsessive—calls to President’s Award-winning artisans, hours spent poring over Weaver Service Centre booklets, even a cold hunt through Varanasi’s bylanes. She never found the rangkaat she had dreamed of, but discovered a new calling instead. In a landscape crowded with Banarasi brocade brands, Agarwal and her sister-in-law Sunaina Jalan have conjured up an anomaly. Their focus is the single-edition sari, which…

My art teacher in school despised me. Not only was I a rabble-rousing backbencher, but I was also exceptionally awful at sketching. The fruits in my still life always looked like they had been sprayed with too much pesticide. My landscapes were a hodophile’s nightmare. “Close your eyes and visualise an apple,” Mrs Vesvikar would bellow at me. I would make a show of shutting my eyes… …And see the same thing I view in my mind’s eye 21 years later. Darkness. Not the headed-towards-apocalypse, doomed-to-die-alone darkness. I mean absolute visual absence. Like a light switch going off in your head. Do I know what an apple looks like? Of course. Can I describe it? Yes, from my memories of having seen different varieties throughout my life. Does a shiny…

Nineties’ kids had the Rachel: Jennifer Aniston’s choppy, shoulder-length haircut from Friends. Today, we have the Rama: somewhere between a bob and a pixie, belonging to illustrator, animator and ceramicist Rama Duwaji, wife of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. The internet is besotted with Duwaji. Her edgy black outfits are representation for ‘weird art girls’; her bombastic side-eye at Mamdani’s inauguration ceremony is the cherry on top of a great start to the year. She skips her husband’s campaign event to teach a ceramics class, barely mentions him on her Instagram and cuts her own bangs? Conservatives clutch their pearls in horror, American newspapers derisively refer to her as an ‘aloof wife’. To social media users, this means infinite aura points. #AloofWifeAutumn starts trending across platforms, hundreds of comments…

Atypical Indian wedding conjures up images of a beautifully decorated stage, the bride and groom at its centre, vowing to spend the rest of their lives together. Beyond them, a sea of people watching. Including the bride’s uncle’s new astrologer and the best man’s breakdancing troupe from college. But for some couples, the tides are shifting, stars are realigning and the guest list is dwindling. An intimate desi wedding sounds faintly contradictory, and yet, it has snuck up on us. Lists that used to run well into the hundreds are now tapering off in the fifties and, gasp… even twenties. Why are couples going down this lean route? Or rather, how are they getting away with it? According to Krish Sheth and Shefali Sharma, whose 55-person wedding took place in…

For every step we take into the future, our feet phantom-walk us two steps into the past. We’re all doing Y2K fashion, we’re all done with clean girl makeup, we’re all going analogue, we’re all meeting IRL. There are different ways to describe this yearning for the ‘good ol’ days’. You can play it by the book and say ‘2026 is the new 2016.’ Or you can swerve off script and lament that ‘the nights just aren’t tandoori anymore’. But what are tandoori nights? And why aren’t the nights tandoori anymore? And more importantly, how do we make the nights tandoori again? Only Himesh Reshammiya knows. And he’s showing us how: through his sold-out Cap Mania Tour, which kicked off in May last year. It’s hard to explain exactly what…

Last fall, after decades of vision so poor I couldn’t recognise my closest friends across a small room without glasses, I paid $10,000 for ICL surgery, a newish Lasik alternative in which permanent contact lenses are installed in one’s eyeballs. Besides the somewhat daunting, monthlong course of prescription eye drops that followed, recovery was swift. I’ve had no major medical complications, only subtle psychological ones: Improving my vision, I realised, impaired the way I saw myself. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I looked in the mirror and saw only my face staring back at me. No brow-hiding frames, no eye-distorting lenses. And most crucially, perhaps, was my nose: bare, no longer horizontally bifurcated by a ridge of black acetate. In a good mood, on…

MANCIE RATHOD Leo Model, documentary photographer How has your style evolved? A lot of my style comes from the women around me—watching how they move through the world, how they adorn themselves. Do you think there’s a ‘Gen Z aesthetic’? Not specifically—what I see instead is a collective nostalgia, a longing for times that felt freer and more expressive. You can see that fashion, at the moment, is informed by previous silhouettes, styles and designs. I think fast-fashion brands today are trying to flatten us into something colourless and uniform. If you had a uniform, what would it be? Light-wash blue jeans, a graphic tank, wooden wedges, my keffiyeh and a quilted flap handbag. What would you wear to a 9-to-5? Either a fitted grey cardigan with a plaid midi…

Safely tucked away in my nani’s cupboard is a rani-pink cotton midi-dress with a billowy fit and pleats that have softened in the absence of its wearer. It was dear to her first-born—my maasi—who passed away in 2019, just shy of her 45th birthday. Despite being unable to speak and carry out basic cognitive tasks due to a developmental disability, Tinu maasi relished the act of dressing up and was meticulous about her clothes. Having spent the majority of my summer vacations with her and my maternal grandparents in Gujarat, I was privy to her wardrobe, stacked exclusively with round-neck midi-dresses in every sprightly colour combination imaginable. These were custom-made by the local tailor, who accounted for her unique body proportions because ready-made garments failed her. If maasi wasn’t in…

The first time I realised my partner was ‘The One’was a moment so deceptively ordinary, you might actually roll your eyes upon reading this. We were exiting my apartment building in the afternoon, when he doubled back and handed me his sunglasses. “It’s very bright, you’ll get a headache,” he said. A man’s act of remembering a throwaway detail shared casually months ago. A woman’s surprise at being seen and cared for in that wholly quotidian, impossibly real way. When I told my partner it was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me, he did actually roll his eyes. When I recounted the incident to my best friend, she understood immediately. Women are so used to shrinking themselves—in public, at the workplace, in marriages, at the gym—that…

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