MAR
A P R
2024
₹200

Triptii Dimri

RIDING
HIGH

PHOTO: SIGNE VILSTRUP/VOGUE INDIA

BEFORE IT’S IN FASHION,
IT’S IN VOGUE!

VOGUE

March-April

76

NIGHT SHIFT
Has the sun set on the evening dress?
Spring runways offered a lighter,
brighter vision for formal dressing—
one hinged on daring silhouettes,
lots of embellishments and an all-in
joie de vivre that rejects the stuffy
and stilted.
Photographed by Campbell Addy
Styled by Max Ortega

84

MRS. PRADA
Almost everyone refers to Miuccia
Prada in the most formal of ways,
but she herself has never been one
to stand on ceremony. Wendell
Steavenson meets a designer who
has built an empire in her own
image: iconic, iconoclastic and
enormously influential.
Photographed by Stef Mitchell
Styled by Alex Harrington

88

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
There have never been more female
designers—or more questions about
why they sometimes still need to
fight for their place in fashion.
Vogue celebrates a global cast of
women whose work and influence
speak for themselves.
Photographed by Bibi Borthwick
Styled by Camilla Nickerson

JACKET, SHORTS, EARRINGS, BELT; ALL GUCCI

58

ASHISH SHAH

66

THE REAL DEAL
Triptii Dimri’s unfiltered spirit
shines through as she races ahead
on her journey to the field of stars.
By Anindita Ghose.
Photographed by Ashish Shah
Styled by Nikhil Mansata
MAXIMUM CAPACITY
Long a source of quiet shame, the
big, messy bag has been reclaimed as
a marker of modern womanhood.
Emily Ratajkowski gives a few of
them a real-world stress test.
Photographed by Larissa Hofmann
Styled by Alex Harrington

vogue india, march-april 2024

3

VOGUE
8

EDITOR’S LETTER

9

CONTRIBUTORS

Style
10

11

12

4

TAKE COVER
A modern update on a household classic, these
aprons are anything but utilitarian. You won’t
catch us mopping up any messy spills in these
HIGH COLLAR
Game, set, match. Pristine polos in every
colour and texture gain new turf beyond
the court
BARE MINIMUM
Reveal all or nothing. Unapologetic
and in-your-face, faux nipples cast in
bras and bodysuits invite you to enjoy an
uninhibited summer

13

PLAYING TRICKS
Fashion’s new trade secret? The thrilling shock
value of optical illusion and the art of
deception. Strut through no-pet zones
confidently with a pigeon on your arm

14

NET RESULT
Feel the breeze between your manicured
toes as you exit the party. Ballet flats crafted
in mesh are set to be the clear winner of
the season

16

MAIN CHARACTER
Sooti saris, ikat skirts, The Row’s crisp
tailoring and outfits whose colours spill over
the dopamine scale—four savants decode their
singular approach to the art of building
personal style. By Shriya Zamindar

20

SOMETHING BORROWED
Take it from thrift connoisseurs, brocade
corsetry and vintage emblems age like
fine wine

21

EPIC SCALE
Buckle up—the chunky statement belt makes
a return in supersized proportions for spring/
summer 2024

22

ETCHED IN STONE
From roses engraved into rubies for the royals
to tourmalines shaped like seashells for
hot-girl summer, Deepthi Sasidharan traces
our obsession with carved gemstones through
the decades

vogue india, march-april 2024

24

PERIOD DRAMA
Timeless gems from the vaults of former
aristocracy find new lovers in connoisseurs

26

BLUE JEAN BABY
LEE X Suneet Varma’s collaboration
featuring Sara Ali Khan merges classic denim
with Indian couture. By Sonakshi Sharma

28

THE GREAT GAMBLE
At the Gucci Ancora showcase in Singapore,
Vogue India got within a hair’s breadth of
Sabato De Sarno’s debut collection. Rochelle
pinto reports on the new direction

32

FRESH OBSESSION
Pick from the bold and bougie to add to your
wishlist this summer. By Shriya Zamindar
Photographed by Savio Gerhart

‘MAIN CHARACTER’, PAGE 16

Wellness & Beauty
36

SMOOTH OPERATOR
Can retinol pack the wrinkle-reducing power
without the irritation? Chloe Malle test-drives
a new generation of kinder formulas rebooting
the superstar skincare ingredient

38

SEPIA TINT
Spring’s signatures are ‘Peach Fuzz’ coded this
season. Harness the spirit of golden hour with
these beauty essentials

40

THE END OF GLITTER
Or are we just at the beginning—of a new era
of microplastic-free, perfectly-healthy-to-eat
sparkle. Tamar Adler reports on glitz to feel
good about

Culture & Living
42

SOFT SERVE
His untimely disappearance from the big
screen nine years ago may have caused serious
heartburn, but Imran Khan is ready to pick up
where he left off—with a few upgrades. By
Sadaf Shaikh.
Photographed by Jacky Nayak
Styled by Manglien Gangte

48

LEARNING TO FLY
Amidst snowfall, skiing and saké, Shagun
Jangid draws warmth from the euphoria of her
first solo trip to Hokkaido’s frigid slopes

50

CONSOLE SISTERS
India’s female gamers are rewriting the age-old
narrative that views women as objects of desire
or damsels in need of saving. By Pritika Rao

SHAGUN JANGID

52

ANCHORS AWEIGH
Having moved houses almost every year of her
life, Kalyani Adhav’s experiences are proof that
home is not a place, it’s a feeling

53

FINDERS KEEPERS
Keepsakes that follow us from home to home,
across time, space and reason

54

HAPPILY EVER LAUGHTER
South Asians have long clamoured for a seat at
the comedy table. Now, Vidura BR, Sabeen
Sadiq, Hari Kondabolu and Abby Govindan
are in on all the jokes

‘LEARNING TO FLY’, PAGE 48

Horoscope
108 See what the month has in store for you
112 DIARY
116 SHOPLIST

In List
118 TRUNK OBSESSION
Scale up your road-trip style with new
glamping essentials like this all-encompassing
handbag from Louis Vuitton. There’s room for
one more cookie with your cache of cards in
this outdoorsy tool kit

vogue india, march-april 2024

5

Rochelle Pinto
EDITOR

MANAGER - CIRCULATION OPERATIONS Jeeson Kollannur
FIELD ASSISTANT Tirupathi Dudam

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Arman Khan
ART DIRECTOR Aishwaryashree
COPY DIRECTOR Neville Bhandara
Senior FEATURES EDITOR Sadaf Shaikh
Fashion Features EDITOR Shriya Zamindar
DIGITAL EDITOR Sonakshi Sharma
VISUALS Editor Savio Gerhart
FASHION ASSOCIATE Manglien Gangte
Junior Designer Shagun Jangid
Junior Features Writer Saachi Gupta

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Amrit Bardhan
Financial Controller Viral Desai
Associate Director - Finance Dattaprasanna Bhagwat
Associate Director - Revenue Support Vinayak Shetye
SENIOR FINANCE ANALYST Yogesh Suresh Potnis
Associate Director - Tax and Treasury Ankit Pansari
Associate Director - General Accounting Sanket Deshpande
Assistant Manager - Disbursement Nikhil Rane
SENIOR ASSOCIATE - DISBURSEMENT Devang Pandya
SENIOR Manager - FP&A Vishal Darji
MANAGER - GENERAL ACCOUNTING Yogesh Gawde
Manager - Disbursement Ameya Namjoshi
ASSISTANT MANAGER - TAXATION Pranav Shah
Senior associateS - billing Sandeep Nalawade, Shailesh Koli

DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS Renuka Joshi Modi
Senior Manager - Operations Khushnam Mistry
ENTERTAINMENT DIRECTOR Megha Mehta
Senior Entertainment Editor (Consultant) Rebecca Gonsalves
Copy manager Sneha Kanchan

Director of Regional Facilities, APAC Boniface D’souza

Art Production Director Mihir Shah
Art Production Manager Geetesh Patil

Associate Director- Procurement Mohammed Farhan Bartanwala
Manager - Travel Services Zain Shaikh
head of legal - india Sambit Das
Legal counsel Ashka Shah

PUBLISHER & Head of Sales
Parul Dawar
Head of Luxury (Commercial) Puja Bilimoria
NATIONAL Category Head Raunaq Raje
CATEGORY HEAD Ruchira Kanwal (New Delhi)
Director - Growth & Monetization Heli Shah
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR – MONETIZATION & PARTNERSHIPS Varun Sama
Associate DirectorS - Growth & Monetization Mukta Malhotra (New Delhi),
Kaetki Bhatia (New Delhi), Dipti Dani
Senior ManagerS - Growth & Monetization Farhana Shaikh, Meenakshi Arora (New Delhi)
ManagerS - Growth & Monetization Shanu Dahiya (New Delhi),
Kajal Jain (New Delhi), Jinal Goradia
Assistant Manager - Growth & Monetization Rijul Labroo (New Delhi)
ITALY SALES REPRESENTATIVE Angelo Carredu
US ADVERTISING MANAGER Alessandro Cremona

Senior Manager, Global Support India Madankumar Thapa
Senior Executive IT Ravi Shah
Technology Support Engineer Kiran Ugale
Business Relationship Manager - Global Product & Technology Vishal Ingale
Senior Director - Global Audience Planning & Operations Saurabh Garg
Consumer Marketing Lead Priyanka Shivdasani
Digital Marketing - Manager Srividya Iyengar
Graphic Designer Trisha Pramanik
BUSINESS PARTNER - CORPORATE Annie George

Head - Events, Marketing & Alliances Ashish Sethi
Senior Manager - Events and Alliances Ravisha Maroo
Manager - Event Operations Shanu Sharma
Senior Manager - Sponsorship & Operations Rupanshi Guliani
Senior Manager - Marketing & Sponsorship Reema Badiani
Manager - Marketing & Sponsorship Daljit Kaur Aulakh

People Director - HR Coralie Ansari
People Specialist - Operations Gayatri Shringarpure
Human Resources - Associate Namrata Natarajan
VOGUE GLOBAL
Anna Wintour Global Editorial Director
European Editorial Director Edward Enninful
APAC Editorial Director (Taiwan, India, Japan) Leslie Sun

Director - PLANNING Alisha Goriawala
CNCC
Director - CNCC Richard Mascarenhas
Creative Director Devika Luniya
CREATIVE LEAD - Native, Social & Promotions Sneha Mahadevan
Associate Director - Client Servicing & Project Management Rohan Chavan
Creative Partner Shamani Joshi
Creative Strategist Avantika Gupta
SENIOR MANAGER - INFLUENCER MARKETING Siddhant Salve
Associate Editor Yoshita Rao
Creative Strategist - Visuals Art Kashvi Bajaj
SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER Atul Hirijagner
Creative Strategist - Art Richa Jain (consultant)
Senior Copy Editor Ritika Saundh
Digital Writer Samanaz Bhot
Production lead - branded content (video) Meenaz Lala
Associate Director - Data Strategy Swapnil Maske
HEAD - AD OPERATIONS Sachin Pujari
Manager - Ad Operations Abhishek Prasad
Assistant Managers - Ad Operations Sagar Lund, Akanksha Malik
COMMERCIAL TALENT DIRECTOR Devika Patne
Director - COMMUNICATIONS Swati Katakam
Manager - Communications Waheeda Machiwala
PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Sunil Nayak
SENIOR MANAGER - COMMERCIAL PRODUCTION Sudeep Pawar
Senior Production Controller Abhishek Mithbaokar

Head of Editorial Content, France Eugénie Trochu
Head of Editorial Content, Germany Kerstin Weng
Head of Editorial Content, Italy Francesca Ragazzi
Head of Editorial Content, Japan Tiffany Godoy
Head of Editorial Content, Mexico & Latin America Karla Martínez de Salas
Head of Editorial Content, Spain Inés Lorenzo
Editor in Chief, China Margaret Zhang
Global Creative Director Juan Costa Paz
Global Print Strategy Lead & European Content Operations Director Mark Russell
Vice President, Global Head of Content Strategy Anna-Lisa Yabsley
Global Head of Fashion Network Virginia Smith
Global Editor at Large Hamish Bowles
Global Director, Vogue Runway Nicole Phelps
Global Network Lead & European Deputy Editor Sarah Harris
Global Network Lead & US Deputy Editor Taylor Antrim
Global Network Lead & European Features Director Giles Hattersley
Global Network Lead & US Fashion Features Director Mark Holgate
Global Network Lead Chioma Nnadi
Global Network Lead & European Beauty & Wellness Director Jessica Diner
Global Fashion Network, Deputy Director Laura Ingham
Global Talent Casting Director Ignacio Murillo
Global Director, Talent & Casting Rosie Vogel-Eades
Global Design Director Aurelie Pellissier Roman
Global Visual Director Jill Caytan
Senior Global Content Planning Manager Milly Tritton
Associate APAC (Taiwan, India, Japan) Content Operations Director Vav Lin

Conde Nast (India) Pvt. Ltd.
Mumbai Unit Nos. 3A & 4, 20th Floor, One Lodha Place, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai - 400013, Maharashtra, India
New Delhi TEC Qutab, Level 1 & 2, Crescent Building, Lado Sarai Mehrauli, New Delhi 110030, India
RNI No.: MAHENG/2007/22797. Vogue India March-April 2024 Vol. 17 Issue 3. Published monthly in English, in Mumbai. Price: ₹ 200. Printed and published
by Parul Dawar on behalf of Conde Nast (India) Pvt. Ltd. Printed at Kala Jyothi Process Pvt. Ltd., Survey No. 185, Masjidband, Kondapur Village, R.R. Dist.
Hyderabad-500084 and published from Unit Nos. 3A & 4, 20th Floor, One Lodha Place, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai - 400 013. Editor: Rochelle Pinto.
Distributed by Living Media India Ltd. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without written permission is strictly prohibited. All prices are correct at the
time of going to press but are subject to change. Manuscripts, drawings and other materials must be accompanied by a stamped addressed envelope.
However, Vogue India cannot be responsible for unsolicited material.

6

vogue india, march-april 2024

#vGcaz1@717#

Sandeep Lodha
MANAGING DIRECTOR

Scan the QR code below
to subscribe

PUBLISHED BY CONDÉ NAST
Chief Executive Officer Roger Lynch
Chairman of the Board Jonathan Newhouse
Global Chief Revenue Officer & President, U.S. Revenue
& International Pamela Drucker Mann
Global Chief Content Officer Anna Wintour
Chief Financial Officer Nick Hotchkin
Chief People Officer Stan Duncan
Chief Communications Officer Danielle Carrig
Chief of Staff Samantha Morgan
Chief Product & Technology Officer Sanjay Bhakta
Chief Content Operations Officer Christiane Mack

MAR
A P R
2024
₹200

WORLDWIDE EDITIONS
France: AD, GQ, Vanity Fair, Vogue
Germany: AD, Glamour, GQ, Vogue
India: AD, Condé Nast Traveller, GQ, Vogue
Italy: AD, Condé Nast Traveller, GQ, La Cucina Italiana,
Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired
Japan: GQ, Vogue, Wired
Mexico and Latin America: AD, Glamour, GQ ,Vogue, Wired
Middle East: AD, Condé Nast Traveller
Triptii Dimri

RIDING
HIGH

Spain: AD, Condé Nast Traveler,
Glamour, GQ, Vanity Fair, Vogue
Taiwan: GQ, Vogue
United Kingdom: Condé Nast Johansens, Condé Nast Traveller, Glamour,
GQ, House & Garden, Tatler, The World of Interiors, Vanity Fair, Vogue,
Vogue Business, Wired
United States: AD, Allure, Ars Technica, Bon Appétit, Condé Nast Traveler,
epicurious, Glamour, GQ, LOVE, Pitchfork, Self, Teen Vogue, them.,
The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired
PUBLISHED UNDER JOINT VENTURE
Brazil: Glamour, GQ, Vogue
PUBLISHED UNDER LICENSE OR COPYRIGHT COOPERATION
Adria: Vogue
Australia: GQ, Vogue
Bulgaria: Glamour
China: AD, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Vogue
Czech Republic and Slovakia: Vogue, Wired
Greece: Vogue
Hong Kong: Vogue, Vogue Man
Hungary: Glamour
Korea: Allure, GQ, Vogue, Wired
Middle East: GQ, Vogue, Wired
Philippines: Vogue
Poland: AD, Glamour, Vogue
Portugal: GQ, Vogue
Romania: Glamour
Scandinavia: Vogue
Singapore: Vogue
South Africa: Glamour, GQ, House & Garden
Thailand: GQ, Vogue
The Netherlands: Vogue
Turkey: GQ, Vogue
Ukraine: Vogue

vogue india, march-april 2024

7

VOGUE Editor's Letter

ALL SMILES
Triptii Dimri climbs up the back of a bus while
shooting her first-ever cover for Vogue India

THE BIG LEAGUE

8

vogue india, march-april 2024

but closer to the stars—once considered
the next big thing, now mulls a return to
the spotlight he rejected. A quartet of
comedians investigates their South Asian
advantage (or lack thereof ) with unapologetic silliness. And a gang of gamers in
saris and tulle dresses sticks it to the patriarchy by redesigning our virtual world.
We built our March-April issue with
outliers, people whose kundlis probably
revealed more twists and turns than a game
of Snakes and Ladders. They know what
it’s like to be underestimated and over-protected. To overthink yourself into inertia.
To feel like the odd one out in every group
while simultaneously being convinced that
you’re somehow the flagbearer of your
community, so you better not mess this up.
Under this kind of pressure, it’s easy
to fall into victim mode, crib about the
paucity of opportunities or invent sinister
ephemera to rail against. Most do.
But as my strict Goan grandmother
drilled into my brain when I was a child,

you need to be able to rise to the occasion.
Even if the occasion demands you scamper up the back of a bus in six-inch stilettos
and tiny leather shorts, as our cover star
Triptii Dimri did, megawatt smile intact.
Or, fed up with being a misrepresented
minority, take matters into your own hands
and level the gaming field, just like Rhea
Gupte, Indrani Ganguly and Mala Sen.
It’s the outliers you should watch out
for; they’ll make history while you’re looking the other way.

SAVIO GERHART

A DAUGHTER OF the hills wears the
mantle of ‘national crush’ as she stakes her
claim to being the next big thing. A prodigal son—from Pali Hill, lower in altitude

Contributors VOGUE

Deepthi Sasidharan

Jacky Nayak

An art historian and archivist,
Sasidharan is also the founder-director
of Eka Archiving Services, a cultural
advisory that works on heritage and
museum projects in India and abroad

Nayak uses colour and composition
to reveal fashion as sculptural
adornment. After fashion school,
he worked various jobs in the industry
before turning to photography

“We live in a time when one can look
at vintage jewellery and get something
similar from the internet delivered in
a day. I’m excited to see how art and
creativity continue to bring our worlds
together.” ‘Etched in stone’, page 22

“The Maison Margiela S/S 2024
Artisanal show by John Galliano,
for whom it felt like a comeback.
I’ve missed him and his work.
His is the world I want to live in.”
‘Soft serve’, page 42

What are you
most excited
about this season?
Anindita Ghose

An author, journalist and communications
consultant, Ghose is a former features
director at Vogue India
“Metallics. I’ve gone through
several pairs of silver sneakers in the
past. I’ve now got myself a sheer,
gold silk sari from Akaaro for a
wedding this summer, which I’m
very much looking forward to wearing.”
‘The real deal’, page 58

Nikhil Mansata

The Kolkata-born, London-based
creative draws inspiration from
South Asian culture to build a new
interpretation of East meets West
“The return of craftsmanship at
fashion houses has been thrilling.
It’s something that we have always
valued in India, so perhaps that is
why it resonated with me.”
‘The real deal’, page 58

vogue india, march-april 2024

9

VOGUE Style
1

2
3

NOIR KEI NINOMIYA

4

A modern update on a
household classic, these aprons
are anything but utilitarian. You
won’t catch us mopping up any
messy spills in these

10

vogue india, march-april 2024

1. ‘Contessa Apron in
Blue Gingham’,
SANDY LIANG,
₹ 16,188 2. ‘Heart
Denim Halterneck Top’,
MASHA POPOVA,
₹ 35,193 3. ‘Apron Suit
Trouser’, PARIS
GEORGIA, ₹ 35,796
4. ‘Vesna Bag’,
CECILIE
BAHNSEN, ₹ 41,009

VOGUE RUNWAY

Take cover

Style VOGUE

1

2

High
collar
Game, set, match. Pristine
polos in every colour
and texture gain new turf
beyond the court

3

VOGUE RUNWAY

4

1. ‘Cotton Hector Pointelle
4-bar Polo’, THOM
BROWNE, ₹1,12,873
2. ‘Corisia Silk Floral-print Headscarf’,
FERRAGAMO, ₹ 37,979
3. ‘Chevron-knit Polo Top’,
MAJE, ₹ 22,439
4. ‘Velvet Posy Ribbon
Tie’, JENNIFER BEHR,
₹ 17,300 5. ‘Marni Market
Diamond Mini Bag in Pink
and Brown Tech Wool’,
MARNI, ₹ 24,370

5

ANDREAS
KRONTHALER
FOR VIVIENNE
WESTWOOD
vogue india, march-april 2024

11

VOGUE Style

Bare
minimum

Reveal all or nothing. Unapologetic
and in-your-face, faux nipples cast
in bras and bodysuits invite you to
enjoy an uninhibited summer
1

SCHIAPARELLI

3

1. ‘Floral-motif Sheer
Body’, DAVID KOMA,
₹ 1,90,711 2. ‘Nipple
Push-up Bra’, SKIMS,
₹ 5,750 3. ‘Rubies Boobies
Necklace’, ANISSA
KERMICHE, ₹ 20,000
4. ‘Venus Candle’, LA
LUMIERE, ₹ 500

12

vogue india, march-april 2024

2

VOGUE RUNWAY

4

Style VOGUE
1. ‘Doctors Mac
Graphic-print Coat’,
CHARLES JEFFREY
LOVERBOY,
₹ 1,42,452 2. ‘Sartorial
Scissors Drop Earrings’,
MOSCHINO, ₹ 26,984
3. ‘Trompe L’Oeil Janty
Mini Skirt’, Y/
PROJECT, ₹ 27,352
4. ‘Black & Brown
Meteor Heeled Sandals’,
OFF-WHITE,
₹ 82,594 5. ‘Pigeon
Clutch Bag’, JW
ANDERSON, ₹ 70,892

2
1

3

4

Playing tricks
Fashion’s new trade secret? The
thrilling shock value of optical illusion
and the art of deception. Strut
through no-pet zones confidently
with a pigeon on your arm

5

vogue india, march-april 2024

13

VOGUE Style

Net result

Feel the breeze between your manicured toes as
you exit the party. Ballet flats crafted in mesh are
set to be the clear winner of the season

1

2

3

ALAÏA
14

vogue india, march-april 2024

1. ‘Leonie Crystal Mesh
Ballet Flats’, LOEFFLER RANDALL,
₹ 23,160 2. ‘Floral
Embroidery Sheer
Ballerinas’, KHAITE,
₹ 1,81,790 3. ‘Minette
Flats’, CHRISTOPHER
ESBER, ₹ 1,80,588
4. ‘Velvet Mesh-panelled
Ballerina Shoes’, JIMMY
CHOO, ₹ 1,63,265

GETTY IMAGES

4

PHOTO: BIKRAMJIT BOSE/VOGUE INDIA

BEFORE IT’S IN FASHION, IT’S IN VOGUE!

Main character

Sooti saris, ikat skirts, The Row’s crisp
tailoring and outfits whose colours spill over
the dopamine scale—four savants decode
their singular approach to the art of building
personal style. By SHRIYA ZAMINDAR

What she’d wear to:
1. A black-tie event: A Comme des
Garçons backless tuxedo jacket with a
pleated skirt, a white shirt, stockings and
brogues.
2. A grocery run: A striped sweater or a
gingham blouse with a full-gathered ikat
skirt, fun stockings and sneakers.
3. A work meeting: All of the above —
something that is visually striking and
comfortable.
Where she shops: Fabindia, Anokhi,
11.11 and Injiri. I also like Uniqlo, Imakokoni, Marimekko, COS and tailor-made items I find online and at vintage stores.
The hero piece in her wardrobe: A tailor-made double ikat dress. It allowed me
to discover clothing that was comfortable,
pushing me to explore styles.
The item on her wish list: Anything in
my size from Comme des Garçon’s fall
2009 and spring 2013 collections.
A character whose wardrobe she identifies with: Ji-Yoon Kim’s [Sandra Oh’s]
wardrobe in the Netflix series The Chair.

TEXTILES AND TEXTURES are love
languages Sandhu speaks fluently. You will
find her teaming gingham and ikat on a
canvas of flared skirts and anti-fit dresses in ingenious ways.

NAME: Arti Sandhu
AGE: 44
HOMETOWN: Cincinnati
and New Delhi
ZODIAC: Libra
OCCUPATION: Fashion
design professor at the
University of Cincinnati
16

vogue india, march-april 2024

Her style identity: It’s an outcome of
collecting interesting pieces over the years.
I start with a foundational piece, then add
three to four more elements to make the
outfit feel harmonious.
The social outlook: My way of dressing
inspires people to look at clothing differently.
Her uniform: A blouse and a skirt or a
dress with a shirt, and fun stockings or
tights with shoes that complement the
colours.

Most sentimental item in her closet: My
mother’s crochet waistcoat from the
1970s, a handmade vintage muslin smock
(purchased in New Zealand) and a black
bandhini scarf. Not monetarily precious,
but irreplaceable.
She’d never be caught wearing: A zardozi lehenga or a bodycon dress. I will never wear uncomfortable clothes or shoes.
Her style tips:
Personal style takes time to develop, so
don’t rush into buying many things at
once to manufacture it. You also need to
come to terms with your body as it is. My
weight, shape and age drive how I dress.
I don’t try to improve who I am or hide
underneath clothes. Personal style isn’t
about buying designer brands; it comes
from a deep appreciation of cut, colour
and textiles, as well as a desire to explore
combinations of these.

Style VOGUE

On personal branding: The way I dress
for work is how I express myself every
day. People like my style because it has
always been a reflection of who I am.
What she’d wear to:
1. A black-tie event: A qi pao. I love integrating my Chinese-Indonesian culture
into my style.
2. A grocery run: Oversized basketball
shorts, a crop top and sneakers.
3. A work meeting: Most of my work
meetings are over video call, so I would
go for a cute T-shirt and my pyjama
shorts.
Where she shops: Depop, Vestiaire Collective and SSENSE. In real life, I visit
markets, charity shops and thrift stores.
I try to integrate conscious ways into all
aspects of my life, so I typically gravitate
towards second-hand pieces or small
designers.
The hero piece in her wardrobe: A red
plaid skirt I bought around nine years ago
at a market for $2.
The item on her wish list: I have been
obsessed with charm bracelets from Pandora and Chopova Lowena.
A character whose wardrobe she identifies with: The style in early 2000s cartoons are the best, like Quinn’s wardrobe
from Daria, or Sam or Clover from Totally Spies.
IF YOU SPOT a head full of braids and
an acid trip of colours on slouchy cargos
and Harajuku-style skirts, it’s probably
Chandra gallivanting about town.

NAME: Tara Chandra
AGE: 26
HOMETOWN: Sydney
ZODIAC: Capricorn
OCCUPATION: Content
creator and beauty
entrepreneur

Her style identity: Eclectic, maximalist,
colourful and monochromatic. I dress
according to the weather and what makes
me feel like the best version of myself.
The social outlook: A woman at the Louvre in Paris told me I was the best thing
she’d seen that day.
Her uniform: An oversized black tee with
a layered black skirt, my Bottega Veneta
bag and either a pair of platform Doc
Martens or platform Balenciaga Crocs,
always black and with socks.

Most sentimental item in her closet: My
late grandfather’s yellow Yves Saint Laurent cardigan and blue reversible Burberry jacket.
She’d never be caught wearing: Right
now, skinny jeans.
Her style tips:
1. Find people online whose style you like.
Spot the overlaps to find pieces you can
add to your wardrobe.
2. Style is about creativity. Find inventive
ways to wear existing pieces, like wearing
a cropped singlet on top of another shirt
or pinning your flowy maxi skirt up so it
creates fun new shapes.
3. Ignore aesthetic constraints. Wear what
you like, whether that’s all black one day
and a rainbow the next.

vogue india, march-april 2024

17

VOGUE Style

NAME: Neelam Ahooja
Age: 53
HOMETOWN: Toronto
ZODIAC: Libra
OCCUPATION: Content
creator
A CONNOISSEUR OF The Row’s
stellar staples, former chartered accountant Ahooja is social media’s preferred style
guide to structured tailoring.
Her style identity: Minimal and oversized, leaning towards masculine silhouettes. My hair is unruly with a mind of
its own and it’s as integral to my look as
the clothes themselves.
The social outlook: My social media
followers respect that I don’t veer from
my authentic expression regardless of
what’s trending and that my style matches my personality. I hope that’s a good
thing.
Her uniform: A basic white tee paired
with black, wide-leg trousers or a black
maxi skirt. Then I play with shoes, bags
and other accessories.
What she’d wear to:
1. A black-tie event: The Row’s Robi dress
in black, Sienna clutch and Constance
thong sandals. And some hoops.
2. A grocery run: The Row’s Eglitta wideleg jeans, oversized white tee, black Malika coat, sneakers and backpack.
3. A work meeting: A tailored black maxi
skirt, button-down shirt, belt and black
blazer teamed with any of The Row’s
Margaux bags.
Where she shops: The Row, Matches
Fashion and The Real Real.
The hero piece in her wardrobe: The
Row’s Sporty backpack is always in rotation. Not too many people care for it and
the contrarian in me really enjoys that.
The item on her wish list: The Row’s
Salpa Margaux 15 bag. It’s unusual and
so cool, especially with those hanging
threads.

18

vogue india, march-april 2024

A character whose wardrobe she identifies with: Denise Huxtable from The
Cosby Show. I also love the classic elegance
of Gwyneth Paltrow and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in the ’90s.
Most sentimental item in her closet: My
David Yurman Thoroughbred watch that
was a gift from my husband after we had
our sons.
She’d never be caught wearing: Shoulder
pads from the ’80s.
Her style tips:
1. Learn what’s flattering on your frame.
If you don’t feel good, it isn’t worth it even
if it’s the latest and greatest.
2. A pair of black trousers and a white
button-down shirt are the perfect foundational pieces. They work even when
you’re struggling with what to wear.
3. You want to feel confident and comfortable. That should be your priority.

NAME: Neha Sahai
AGE: 38
HOMETOWN: Varanasi
ZODIAC: Aquarius
OCCUPATION: Artist
ELEGANT SARIS TEAMED with
corsets, belts and a cornucopia of jewellery,
Sahai’s vibrant aesthetic spills over from
the canvas into her wardrobe.
Her style identity: I can’t imagine myself
in anything other than saris—jamdanis,
Kolkata cotton or a sooti sari from Raw
Mango. I experiment with blouses, so I
oscillate between Chantilly lace bralettes
and leather corsets.
The social outlook: People compare my
style to Meena Kumari’s or Amrita SherGil’s. Once, a woman told me that I
looked like I had walked straight out of
a Guru Dutt movie.
Her uniform: A Muji shirt dress with
Kilchu chappals or a cotton sari and shirt
paired with a printed petticoat, juttis and
silver jewellery.

black Patan Patola—I imagine wearing
these together.
On personal branding: All my life, I felt
like an invisible woman who never had
any style of her own. When I began painting in 2019, it gave me an outlet to express
myself, and I started experimenting with
fashion too. Being an artist, nobody expects you to follow the rules anyway.
What she’d wear to:
1. A black-tie event: A black georgette
Banarasi sari with a lace corset, stilettos,
and a high bun with a gulaab.
2. A grocery run: A basic long shirt dress
and sneakers.
3. A work meeting: A crisp cotton sari,
silver jewellery and juttis.
Where she shops: Raw Mango, péro,
Maku and 11.11. The textile bazaar Dastkar is my all-time favourite. For shoes, I
browse Kilchu, Fizzy Goblet and Ferragamo. My bags are vintage pieces and my
silver jewellery is from Dariba Kalan.
The hero piece in her wardrobe: A vintage clutch.
The item on her wish list: The spine corset from Alexander McQueen and a

A character whose wardrobe she identifies with: Meena Kumari’s character,
Chhoti Bahu, from Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962).
Most sentimental item in her closet: My
mother’s Dorukha Banarasi sari, which
my grandfather commissioned for their
wedding. He couldn’t afford to splurge,
so my mother wore flower jewellery with
her sari instead of diamonds and gold.
She would not be caught wearing: You
will never find me wearing shorts and a
T-shirt.
Her style tips:
1. Be comfortable. I usually wear my saris with sneakers, but in winter I switch
to boots or swap my regular petticoats
with woollen skirts.
2. Observe what element of your style
speaks to you the most and incorporate
it into your wardrobe one piece at a time
so it doesn’t overwhelm you.
3. Make a piece of clothing your own. I
wasn’t good at draping and I was scared
I might fall, so I started using belts to
hold things in place.

vogue india, march-april 2024

19

VOGUE Style
VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

Something
borrowed

Take it from thrift connoisseurs,
brocade corsetry and vintage
emblems age like fine wine
1. ‘The Countess Heels’,
TWO EXTRA LIVES, ₹ 33,000
2. Vintage velvet dress, BYGONE
ECHOES, price on request
3.‘Vintage Chanel Coco Mark
Round Swing Clip-on Earrings
(90s)’, MY ALMARI, ₹ 1,20,959
4. Upcycled royal blue brocade corset,
BODEMENTS, price on request

1

2
4

20

vogue india, march-april 2024

PRABUDDHA DASGUPTA

3

Style VOGUE

Epic scale
1

Buckle up—the chunky
statement belt makes a return
in supersized proportions for
spring/summer 2024

1. ‘Black Meteor Belt’, FANCÌ
CLUB, ₹ 28,232 2. ‘Fixed Belt
with Sculptured Buckle’,
FERRAGAMO, price on
request 3. ‘Nelson’ belt,
PALOMA WOOL, ₹ 20,500
4. ‘High Shine-finish Belt’,
PHILOSOPHY DI LORENZO SERAFINI, ₹ 45,080

2

3

VOGUE RUNWAY

4

21

MIU MIU
vogue india, march-april 2024

vogue india, march-april 2024

21

VOGUE Style

From roses engraved into rubies for the
royals to tourmalines shaped like
seashells for hot-girl summer, DEEPTHI
SASIDHARAN traces our obsession with
carved gemstones through the decades

T

ROYAL TREASURY
Rani Parvati Kaur Sahiba of
Kapurthala, née Katoch, wears a stylish
sari over a fitted, embroidered blouse. A
large, carved emerald forms the focus
of her stunning necklace

22

vogue india, march-april 2024

ARCHIVAL PAINTING COURTESY OF RAJEEV RAWAT COLLECTION

Etched in stone

he Maharaja of Kashmir was
oblivious when sapphires
were first discovered in his
kingdom nearly 150 years
ago. A small cache of rough,
blue stones found in the mountain passes was picked up by passing traders as
souvenirs and brought to Delhi. Someone
realised their worth and they were subsequently traded, bartered and sold repeatedly until they landed in Kolkata
where they were bought for a price equivalent to $400,000 today. When Maharaja Ranbir Singh of Kashmir heard of
this, his furious demands led to a recall,
and a reverse domino effect of sales was
put in motion with every transaction
undone till someone in Delhi unwittingly got a few bags of salt. The stones were
returned to the gleeful Maharaja who laid
claim to the now fabled mines and famously wore the finest blue sapphire
stone—a beautiful ‘blue velvet’ colour—
around his neck. To add to its extravagance, he had it carved.
Gemstones with fine designs etched
onto their surface are the ultimate indulgence because an artisan strives to transpose beauty on beauty. Through the decades, these carved rubies, emeralds and
lustrous candy-toned stones have been
treasured by royals and connoisseurs alike.
This unique design intervention invariably plays on the symmetrical floral motifs
of poppies plucked from Babur’s geometrically precise Charbagh, as seen in
Mughal miniatures. And the practice
flourishes to this day. What was once a
rare gem in Cartier’s archives has inspired
modern bestsellers at young jewellery
brands such as Studio Metallurgy and
Anu Merton alongside legacy names such
as Viren Bhagat and Amrapali.
“I have grown up observing the beauty of emeralds. A carved one is easily one
of the most envy-inducing jewels,” says
Jaipur-based Richa Rawat, a third-gen-

1

1. Necklace, SWAPNA
MEHTA, price on request
2. ‘Pendentif Étoile de
Mer’, VIOLETTE
JOAILLERIE, ₹ 1,17,052
3. Kalgi, CHAND
BEGUM, price on request

2

3

Beyond nimble fingers and a creative
eye, an expert can bring this labour of
love to its best shape by gauging its
composition, colours and patterns, much
in the same way a skilled sculptor would
eration jeweller. Her clients, among the
most discreet and distinguished buyers
in the country, are always interested in
these stones. “Carving an emerald requires a specialised artisan with refined
skills, as a mistake can easily fracture the
soft stone.”
The intricate details on the stones
reveal only one part of the story. Beyond
nimble fingers and a creative eye, an expert
can bring this labour of love to its best

shape by gauging its composition, colours
and patterns, much in the same way a
skilled sculptor would.
Rawat explains that the preference
for the Mughal aesthetic reached its zenith in the early 20th century when European design houses like Cartier and
Van Cleef & Arpels started resetting
carved Indian gemstones in exciting new
designs like the former’s colourful Tutti
Frutti collection of necklaces and brace-

lets. Rani Parvati Kaur Sahiba of Kapurthala wore her carved emeralds with
élan and Princess Sita Devi Kapurthala,
regarded as one of the most beautiful
women of her time, is remembered for
her patronage of art deco jewels.
For Violette Basentsyan, a French
designer from Marseille, stumbling upon
carved stones, tourmalines in particular,
was an aha moment. “When I saw the
skill of gemstone carvers in Jaipur, it all
came together: my fascination with marine life (I grew up near the sea), my desire to work with fine jewellery, the natural colour gradations in precious stones
and the exquisite craftsmanship,” she says.
Basentsyan now spends five months a year
in Jaipur and creates fun, everyday pieces
at her eponymous brand Violette Joaillerie
that capture her love for the ocean—dainty tentacles of octopuses and coral reef
fish that come alive in 18K gold, diamonds and precious stones.
For Kunwar Bahadur of Chand Begum, a centuries-old Delhi-based firm
that specialises in sourcing bejewelled
pieces for collectors and museums, a
carved gemstone is a delight to source for
a new custodian. “Young people like to
wear luxury jewellery every day, and
carved gemstones are a quiet way to make
a statement, as with cuff links or a ring,”
he says. “On the other hand, for weddings,
a statement can be made with a carved
stone bajuband or a turban ornament.”
Jewellery designer Swapna Mehta
uses her artistic wizardry to take found
bits of jewellery—a lost earring, a broken
pendant, a forgotten hair ornament—and
give them new form based on meticulous
research and an iterative creative process.
As someone who sees every form of
craftsmanship in India, she says there is
a quiet thrill when she chances on a carved
stone. “I typically place it as the focal point
of my piece and then work outwards or
upwards. Even if it’s a tukdi, sometimes
it is so beautiful and unique that it takes
my breath away,” she says.
The journey of a carved precious stone
is a remarkable one, from its origins in a
mine to its arrival into the skilled hands
of a carver, and finally, passed lovingly
from owner to owner.

vogue india, march-april 2024

23

VOGUE Style

Period drama
1963
CARTIER: Originally called
the Hindu necklace and
renamed the Tutti Frutti in the
’70s, this necklace features
carved emerald, ruby and
sapphire foliage with diamonds

Timeless gems from the vaults
of former aristocracy find new
lovers in connoisseurs

1970

TIFFANY & CO.: Rare
earrings made by the
legendary Jean
Schlumberger for Tiffany
& Co., the original set
features an intricate
layout of carved emeralds

2017

AMRAPALI: A Victorianinspired gold necklace set
with carved emeralds,
polki and full cut diamonds

2022
SABYASACHI HIGH
JEWELLERY: The
Baghbazar necklace features
130.24-carat emeralds, yellow
sapphires and diamonds

24

vogue india, march-april 2024

RAJEEV RAWAT COLLECTION

ROYAL BEGINNINGS
Maharaja Hari Singh of
Kashmir wearing a large
blue carved sapphire

PHOTO: ATHUL PRASAD/CONDÉ NAST TRAVELLER INDIA

THE LAST WORD IN TRAVEL

IT TAKES TWO
Varma chose Sara Ali Khan to
be the face of his collab with
LEE. “She’s smart, eloquent
and sure of herself, and that’s
important to me,” he says
26

vogue india, march-april 2024

KEEGAN CRASTO/PUBLIC BUTTER AT INEGA TALENTS.

VOGUE Style

Blue jean baby

LEE X Suneet Varma’s collaboration featuring
Sara Ali Khan merges classic denim with
Indian couture. By SONAKSHI SHARMA

ADRIAN FISK (RIGHT)

F

ashion is a polite way to talk
about sex,” Suneet Varma tells
me giddily as he Zooms from
his Delhi office. So when this
collaboration with American
denim giant LEE came around, he wanted to retain the inherent sexiness of his eponymous label and
cross the border from Indian
couture to create a ready-towear line-up.
In his body of work spanning over three decades, the
designer has developed a thick
dossier of collaborations, from
home furnishings with Ascent
Decor to bejewelled handbags
with Judith Leiber. But what
makes this fusion with LEE
special for Varma is the fact that
he’s been tasked with injecting
a sense of novelty into the utilitarian fabric that’s become all
too common in our daily style
lexicon.
From Iman Abdulmajid
strutting down the Alaïa autumn/winter 1985 runway in a
denim dress to Princess Diana’s
acid-wash jeans that she wore
to the Guards Polo Club in 1988
and Sonam Kapoor Ahuja’s distressed denim sari for the promotion of Veere Di Wedding in
2018, denim has lived a full life
cycle. But that didn’t faze Varma.
“I gained a new perspective
on design because I removed myself from
what I am programmed to create,” he adds
as we speak about moving outside his
comfort zone. Denim has a life of its own
that’s hard to contain, and with this collection, he attempts to metamorphose it
with multiple washes, tailoring and embellishment.
The process didn’t come without its

challenges. Considering the fabric’s nature, moulding denim proved to be an
uphill battle, but Varma saw it as an opportunity. “It was a democratic and revolutionary fabric at its inception, but
adapting to its structure was an educa-

TIME CAPSULE
Varma prepares for his Midsummer
Night’s Dream-themed fashion show
for autumn/winter 1999

tional process for someone like me who
is silhouette-driven,” he says with a hint
of satisfaction in his voice.
So when Varma took it upon himself
to reinvent it for this collaboration,

christened Denim Beyond Definition,
he looked to the past for inspiration.
His drawing board comprised pop-cultural denim-dressing references from
Zeenat Aman and Brooke Shields to
Grace Kelly.
“Denim is far bigger than
how any one individual perceives it, so I had to push its
limits,” he adds. This led him to
explore uncharted waters and
print gold foil on jackets, and
adopt plaid and metallic riveting. Since the collection is targeted at an audience that’s relatively younger than the
traditional Suneet Varma customer, he consciously retained
his style with embellishment,
thread and mirrorwork on the
stalwarts of a Gen-Z wardrobe—corsets, bell-bottom
jeans and maxi skirts.
To further strengthen the
connection with this new consumer base, he chose actor Sara
Ali Khan as the headlining act.
“She’s not just a pretty face. She’s
also smart, eloquent and sure of
herself, and that’s important to
me,” he emphasises. These characteristics come through on set
with her volley of quips, followed by her classic opener
“Namaste Darshakon,” as she
beams for the camera. She listens attentively to the stylist
while studying the references on the mood
board, and fine-tunes lighting with the
photographer.
For Varma, this seven-month-long
journey has come to fruition and he’s
happy with the outcome. The veteran says,
“I hope the garments become a tool of
expression and find space in cupboards
across the country.”

vogue india, march-april 2024

27

VOGUE Style

TOWER OF POWER
Moss has her hands
ecstatically full. Trench
coat, dress, bags, shoes,
necklace; all GUCCI
28

vogue india, march-april 2024

The great gamble

At the Gucci Ancora showcase in Singapore, Vogue India got
within a hair’s breadth of Sabato De Sarno’s debut
collection. ROCHELLE PINTO reports on the new direction
t’s fitting that Sabato De Sarno’s
debut collection kicked off its international tour in a former chapel. The air at Claudine, Singapore’s
trendiest new French bistro, is
redolent with the aroma of butter
being generously ladled over the evening’s
sustenance as accents from every corner
of Asia-Pacific reverberate across the
room. My fellow guests are acolytes of
the Church of Gucci. And the new head
priest is in modernisation mode.
This evening, we’ve gathered to raise
a toast to De Sarno’s exacting vision. I
presume it’s a happy coincidence, but
Claudine’s scarlet ceiling is close to the
intoxicating Rosso Ancora that the creative director threaded together from the
archives and rebirthed on the Milan
spring/summer 2024 runway.
And his rebrand doesn’t stop with a
fresh coat of paint.
De Sarno offers a textbook example
of what Coco Chanel meant when she
said, “Before you leave the house, look in
the mirror and take one thing off.” Where
his predecessor Alessandro Michele
fuelled sales of nearly 10 billion euros a
year on the back of an everything-andthe-kitchen-sink aesthetic, the new head
priest of the Church of Gucci likes to
peel back the shiny layers and leave only
what is essential.
Michele understood the power of
spectacle: Instagram virality comes easy
when you send models marching down
the ramp carrying plastic facsimiles of
their own heads. So it felt delightfully
ironic when De Sarno’s first showcase set
keyboards on fire for doing the exact opposite. Critics in the comments section
lambasted the ‘Zarafication of Gucci’
because it suddenly seemed so…wearable?
Even with the attenuated hemlines (to
match our attention spans) and smattering of crystals as big as eyeballs, this version of the beloved brand seemed almost
spartan in contrast to what we’d come to
expect over the past seven years.

WRITTEN IN STONE
Lila Moss at Rome’s Fontana della Dea Giunone.
Dress, GUCCI

vogue india, march-april 2024

29

VOGUE Style

IN AND OUT
Top: De Sarno (seated) overseeing a fitting at Gucci’s Rome headquarters.
Above: The writer and other guests at the Gucci Ancora showcase in Singapore

De Sarno is aware of this collection
being written off as yet another
ode to quiet luxury, but he insists
the volume is in the details

It would, however, be an oversimplification to label it minimalism. De Sarno’s
is a mindful approach to dressing up—
intentionality, as your life coach might
insist on calling it. He’s aware of this
collection being written off as yet another ode to quiet luxury, but he insists the
volume is in the details. Significant effort
has been invested in testing fabrics and

30

vogue india, march-april 2024

craft techniques, building, then doubling
down on certain proportions. And paying
heed to the emotional connection with
the wearer rather than baiting reactions
from the onlooker.
In an interview with Vogue, he explains
that he wants to “dress people who go to
work and go on dates”. And he trusts
they’ll come to appreciate the quality and

focus the clothes clearly demonstrate,
once they look up from the photos on
their phones and actually touch and feel
the collection.
Luckily, at the Singapore showcase,
we got to do just that. The tailoring is
above reproach—clean lines that flow

FASHION PHOTOS: THEO LIU. FASHION EDITOR: GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON. HAIR: BENJAMIN MULLER. MAKEUP: KALI KENNEDY.
PRODUCED BY MAGMA PRODUCTIONS. FOR THEO LIU PHOTOS: MANICURIST: MARIACRISTINA FIDANZA. TAILOR: GIULIA POLVERELLI

HEARTS AND FLOWERS
Moss poses in a pop of lime
green amidst blooms. Jacket,
shorts, sunglasses, shoes,
earring; all GUCCI

from the workwear looks to the eveningwear Ancora Notte. The leather pencil
skirts and short shorts may not fly off
shelves but you can be assured of their
popularity amidst the influencer and celebrity set, who I would wager is their
true intended audience.

With a bejewelled bralet here, a tasselled lime green coat there, De Sarno
hasn’t completely abandoned the code of
playfulness that Michele made his core
proposition. Only, it’s of the andaaze se
school of thought that would be familiar
to anyone who’s asked their mother for a

recipe. You, the customer, get to decide
how quirky or dialled-back you want to
be. Because this is ultimately a collection
of separates that can be interspersed to
create innumerable combinations. And
most importantly, won’t feel dated after
you post them once on Instagram.

vogue india, march-april 2024

31

VOGUE Cult

GOLD & SILVER POLKI CROSS NECKLACE, VALLIYAN
This year, try out grand symbolism instead of moonbathing to survive retrograde. Talismans have enjoyed great success in
style eras. Vivienne Westwood’s signature chokers, which came suspended with the brand’s orb logo, and Alexander
McQueen’s 1996 collection Dante, which carried biblical references, are top of mind. Perhaps Kim Kardashian acquiring
Princess Diana’s iconic Attallah Cross at an auction last year will convince you to adopt this accessory. Closer to home,
Valliyan’s supersized statement necklace, handcrafted using polki and 18K gold, has all the hallmarks of an evergreen classic.
‘Gold & Silver Polki Cross Necklace’, VALLIYAN, ₹15,965
32

vogue india, march-april 2024

GIA MINAUDIÈRE, JADE BY
MONICA & KARISHMA
In Umrao Jaan-speak, the perfect
party accent should be a reticule
that you can use to stow away beauty elixirs and stave off unwanted
suitors at the same time, and this
handy clutch would do a solid job
of it. Plated in 18K gold and silver,
and masterfully engraved with
patterns by silversmiths in West
Bengal, these cocktail purses have
become a signature item at JADE
by Monica & Karishma. Inspired
by a vintage coin purse Monica
Shah discovered on her travels
across India, the clutch evokes
nostalgic romance. Transport
yourself to an era where your attar
packs notes of musky oud, your lips
are lacquered in vermilion and
you’re dressed in a lavish Banarasi
with gold filigree.
‘Gia - Minaudière’,
JADE BY MONICA AND
KARISHMA, ₹46,400

Fresh obsession

Pick from the bold and bougie to add to your wishlist this summer.
By SHRIYA ZAMINDAR. Photographed by SAVIO GERHART
vogue india, march-april 2024

33

VOGUE Cult

KIRAN SKIRT, IMLI DANA
Madras checks, the handwoven riot of colour that first emerged from sleepy fishing villages along India’s east coast,
have intrigued and inspired designers for centuries—including Maria Grazia Chiuri, who whipped them into shift
dresses that filed out of Dior’s fall 2023 runway against the backdrop of the Gateway of India. The Indian rendition
of plaid is surprisingly versatile, as demonstrated by textile artist Shradha Kochhar through Imli Dana’s repurposed
skirts, artfully patched together using fabric scraps. The calf-length Kiran wrap skirt defies the conventional approach
to craft by giving handloom the cool-girl rebrand. Thick, thin, wide and colourful, the skirt’s quirky combination of
checks possesses the power to go from the kind of timeless sophistication associated with Dior’s ateliers to the
grunge aesthetic preferred by London-based label Chopova Lowena. It’s all in the eye of the crafter.
‘Kiran Skirt’, IMLI DANA, ₹18,600
34

vogue india, march-april 2024

MODEL: VAISHNAVI K/INEGA

SUROCCO FRAYED RAFFIA HAT, SHIVAN & NARRESH
Designer duo Shivan Bhatiya and Narresh Kukreja live and breathe holiday style, and you will be sure to find luxurious accents
that you may not deem practical—but definitely essential—under their umbrella. Their brand’s raffia hat takes inspiration from
predecessors who have had a good run in the beach hat relay race. Early runway spottings include Gianfranco Ferre’s spring/
summer 1992 collection for Dior, and later, Jacquemus’s popular giant Le Chapeau Bomba hat in 2017, proving the straw hat’s
recurring presence in current and future fashion cycles. The large version by the latter crowned the heads of many It-girls and
supermodels, including Saint Tropez-bound Kendall Jenner. Consider this frayed version by Shivan & Narresh an all-in-one
investment. Beyond its stylish roots, it offers shade from the sun and a brim that will ensure your body remains contact-free at
an impromptu cruise party. Pack itsy-bitsy string bikinis in your luggage to find room for this XXL accent and set sail.
‘Surocco Frayed Raffia Hat’, SHIVAN & NARRESH, ₹17,950
vogue india, march-april 2024

35

VOGUE Wellness & Beauty

Smooth operator

S

oon after I had my second child
and the tight, brioche- bun
sheen of pregnancy skin had
faded to a postpartum gefilte-fish grey, I saw a meme on
the Instagram stories of a younger friend’s
younger sister: “If The O.C. was your favourite show in 2004, it’s time to add
retinol to your skincare routine,” it read
in sans serif letters over a cast photo of
the beloved early- aughts high-school
dramedy. Already in college when it aired,

36

vogue india, march-april 2024

I was a little too old to be gripped by
Mischa Barton’s teenage shenanigans, but
the reference immediately aged me.
A month later, a male friend caught
me similarly off-guard. “Do you use retinol? Should I use retinol?” he asked earnestly. There is apparently a special French
GENTLE GIANTS
Time-release encapsulation and
natural alternatives are making retinol
more tolerable for more people

formula that isn’t even allowed in the
United States, he relayed, wide-eyed.
Retinol had become that person you meet
at a party, and then run into repeatedly
thereafter.
That’s likely due to the fact that at 37,
I am starting to seriously think about
wrinkles—and how to get rid of them.
But there also seems to be a retinol renaissance afoot thanks to new technology, green and clean formulas and, of
course, the medical school of TikTok,

NICK SETHI

Can retinol pack the wrinkle-reducing power without the
irritation? Chloe Malle test-drives a new generation of kinder
formulas rebooting the superstar skincare ingredient

where interest in the multitasking mole- based alternatives that often complement mulas such as SkinMedica’s Retinol
cule that promises to ward off the earliest the hard stuff. “They can enhance retinol Complex 0.25%, once a week then gradsigns of ageing has generated over 3.2
to make it work more efficiently,” Holey ually increasing the frequency to every
billion views.
explains of ingredients such as bakuchiol, night—which is good advice for any of
It’s kind of like how Viagra’s intend- which is derived from the leaves and seeds the myriad retinol options now available
ed use was to treat hypertension, Elisabeth of the anti-inflammatory babchi plant, a to satisfy increased demand. A simple
Bouhadana confirms of retinol’s origin herb common in Indian Ayurvedic and search revealed retinol hand creams (Soft
story via Zoom from her lab in Clichy, Chinese medicines. Their emulsion also Services Theraplush Overnight Repair
France: Thirty years ago, the rampant includes retinyl sunflowerseedate, anoth- Treatment uses 0.05% pure retinol in a
dispatch of Retin-A—also known as reti- er bio-retinol that works to support the
satiny cream that smells like cake batter
noic acid, or tretinoin in its prescriptionskin’s barrier function. “It’s an easier way and left my hands gleaming through the
grade form—as an oil-reducing acne to acclimate to a very active ingredient,” morning); retinol eye creams (Ilia has
solution inadvertently led to retinol’s explains Nadeau.
added sea fennel extract, a plant-based
discovery as a panacea for optimising both
But do these bio-retinols actually do retinol alternative to peptides and cafskin tone and texture. Wearing a crisp lab anything? And does using a non-prescrip- feine, which managed to plump my
coat and a fresh blowout, the biochemist tion, over-the-counter retinoid defeat the under-eye area and maybe even lighten
and L’Oréal Paris international scientific purpose of using one at all?
my dark circles); and a retinol-like SPF
director is giving me a SparkNotes over“I’d rather you use something less product, which was once considered unview of the ingredient, which is often aggressive more consistently so you get thinkable because of retinol’s inherent
incorrectly used as a blanket term for a some benefit,” suggests New York–based photosensitivity. (Supergoop has boostlarger group of vitamin A derivatives dermatologist Shereene Idriss, MD. I ed its mineral SPF with bakuchiol to
called retinoids. “It accelerates the rate at
meet Idriss at her sleek Bryant Park office, provide bio-retinol benefits to your daiwhich the new cells migrate onto the her forehead as smooth as the skating ly dose of UV protection with a light tint
surface and stimulate messengers, which rink below. “It’s case by case, but retinol and a silky texture.) “Being able to have
then tell the cells to prothese ingredients in
duce more collagen,” she
very sensorial formulas,
explains in a jovial French
“I’d rather you use something less aggressive which are also perfectaccent, adding that it can
ly tolerated by most
more consistently so you get some benefit”
take one to two months
skin types, is really the
to see results.
revolution,” Bouhada—SHEREENE IDRISS, dermatologist
“It’s the gold standna says, shouting out
ard,” adds Marie-VeL’Oréal’s Revitalift
ronique Nadeau, a chemist and the crea- probably does delay how long you can go Derm Intensives 0.3% Pure Retinol Setor of her namesake natural skincare line. without Botox,” the social-media-favorite rum, which also incorporates hydrating
“There is nothing like it for not only doctor confirms. (Her heavily trafficked hyaluronic acid.
slowing the advance of skin aging, but Instagram account features a cheat sheet
Less than two months after beginalso to actually reverse certain types of of “Retinoids 101” and uses emojis to ning my own retinol experience, with no
photo damage.” Nadeau and her business relay the ingredient’s varying strength, irritation to speak of, I can’t help but
partner, holistic skin care expert Kristina starting with retinol ester—eyes closed agree. The skin above my brows appears
Holey, have signed on to a call with me smiley face—and progressing to retinoic less crinkled, too. My aunt, who is prone
from their homes in San Francisco to talk acid—wide eyes, red cheeks.) Embracing to hyperbole, recently confirmed as
about their recently launched Multi-Reti- Barbie-core in a fuchsia Veronica Beard much. “Look at your baby skin,” she said
nol Night Emulsion, which is billed as a corduroy blazer, Idriss leans over to ex- as I held my daughter, now 10 months.
clean, microbiome-friendly replacement amine my T-zone. “You talk with your “You two look the same.” An exaggerafor prescription retinoids. As someone forehead,” she tells me sternly, motioning tion, yes, but validating enough to help
who has been hesitant to try retinol for to the lines above my brow ridge.
me brush off another triggering meme
I repeat my concerns of a possible I saw a few weeks later, one that timefear of a bad reaction (redness, flaky-dry
skin), I find the product particularly ap- reaction, or the dreaded “skin purging”— stamped various TV doctors’ popularity
pealing because of a general approach that when breakouts, redness, or irritation get and assigned skin treatments to their
worse before they get better at the beHoley describes as respectful of the skin’s
respective, ageing audiences: If you loved
delicate moisture barrier, which, when ginning of a retinol regimen—to Idriss, Meredith Grey, retinoids; ER-era
compromised by harsh ingredients or but she assures me that new timed-release
George Clooney, Botox; Doogie Howsabrasive exfoliants, loses its ability to keep formulations for slower, gentler absorp- er, fillers; Hawkeye from MASH,
hydration in and external aggressors out. tion will likely prevent that from hap- skin-tightening devices. I’ve always been
Holey and Nadeau have deployed a pening. She recommends trying low team Meredith Grey, I thought to myself,
new class of ‘alt-retinols’ or gentle, plant- concentrations in over-the-counter for- as I casually scrolled on.
vogue india, march-april 2024

37

VOGUE Style
1. TOM FORD ‘Bitter Peach’
EDP, ₹ 32,838 2. CLÉ DE
PEAU BEAUTÉ ‘Lip Glorifier’
in Coral, ₹ 3,908 3. WESTMAN ATELIER ‘Eye Love
You’ mascara, ₹ 5,000
4. CHARLOTTE TILBURY
‘Beautiful Skin Sun-kissed Glow
Bronzer’ in 1 Fair, ₹ 4,821

1

2

3

Spring’s signatures are ‘Peach
Fuzz’ coded this season. Harness
the spirit of golden hour with
these beauty essentials

38

vogue india, march-april 2024

4

SHAHZAD BHIWANDIWALA

Sepia tint

PHOTO: JIGNESH JHAVERI/AD INDIA

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL HOMES IN THE WORLD

VOGUE Wellness & Beauty

The end of glitter?
DID YOU KNOW that blue morpho
butterflies, one of the most iridescent
animals on earth, have only brown pigment in their wings? Or that the single
most vibrantly coloured living thing is
the berry from an African plant called
Pollia condensata, which doesn’t have any
pigment?”
“You’re trying to distract me,” says my
husband, to whom I’m helpfully reciting
these facts. He’s relentless. He should have
been a lawyer. “Tell me you’re not about
to fill our house with glitter.”
The delicate thing is that I am. I’m
packing away his sewing supplies (he’s an
amateur seamster) to make room for boxes and boxes of loose glitter, glittery nail
40

vogue india, march-april 2024

polish, glitter eye shadow, glitter bath
bombs and so on.
Glitter is in the air, both figuratively
and, I recently learned, literally—from Lil
Nas X as a glitter cat at last year’s Met
Gala (courtesy of Pat McGrath) to #Mermaidcore, the social media aesthetic that
merges sparkle, opalescence and fins.
“Glitter has this emotional play to it,” says
Donni Davy, makeup artist for the opulently bedazzled Euphoria. Glitter is transgressive. You don’t wear it to look sexy,
RAZZLE-DAZZLE
In October 2023, the EU banned
microplastic glitter, prompting a wave
of reformulations in cosmetics

you wear it to look cosmic. “Without light,
glitter just looks like particles,” Davy says.
“But when the light hits, it comes alive.”
My husband’s objection derives from
the unfortunate fact that glitter is composed of microplastics—bits of plastic
smaller than five millimetres. And microplastics are now found in, among other things, tap water, breast milk, fruit, rain,
and Antarctic snow. They’ve made their
way to locations as far-flung as the Mariana Trench and Mount Everest. The
glitter found in much nail polish or eye
shadow has historically consisted of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or polyvinyl chloride (PVC), layered with aluminium and styrene acrylate, and then

PHOTO: LARA GILIBERTO. PROP STYLIST: LUNE KUIPERS

Or are we just at the beginning—of a new era of
microplastic-free, perfectly-healthy-to-eat sparkle.
TAMAR ADLER reports on glitz to feel good about

finely cut into geometric shapes. All the
glitter ever made still exists. Remember
how in the 18th century Antoine Lavoisier declared that matter can never be
destroyed? I think he meant glitter.
In October the European Union, inferring that microplastics shouldn’t be so
omnipresent, banned microplastic glitter.
By 2027, it will be illegal to put glitter in
shower gels and face wash. By 2035, in
any makeup at all. How many pounds of
microplastics have you licked off your lips
in your decades of adulthood? I call Phoebe Stapleton, associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Rutgers. “Microplastics are in our blood, our placentas,
our body tissues. They’re everywhere we’ve
looked so far,” she says. The sources of our
internal microplastics are wide. “Glittery
makeup isn’t of any more concern than all
other sources of microplastics. But there
isn’t any less concern either.”
I search for ‘biodegradable glitter’ and
discover that in recent years, there’s been
glitter made from the cellulose of eucalyptus trees and wood pulp—materials
that are used in some biodegradable plastic bags. According to a number of researchers, however, these ‘biodegradable’
glitters are only theoretically biodegradable: they only decompose in particular
conditions—specifically, in industrial
composters. Which would mean coming
home from a night out and scraping one’s
makeup off into a compost bucket whose
contents will be appropriately processed.
But then I have an epiphany. Remember edible glitter, that modish ingredient
which sparkled atop lattes and pizza circa 2017? Per instructions on Craftsuprint
.com, I combine kosher salt with red food
colouring and bake it at 350 degrees for
10 minutes, using the precious time to
find Vaseline, which should turn my
homemade glitter into lip gloss. I eagerly retrieve my baking sheet. I grant that
my salt is Diamond Crystal Kosher and
my red food colouring is made of organic beets, but what I end up with is not
sparkly at all. I apply it as lip gloss and
look like I have smallpox.
Might professionally made edible
glitter offer more promise? Recently, a
company named Fancy Sprinkles has
started making FDA-approved edible
glitter out of mica—a group of 37 silicate
minerals found in granite and other
rocks—dextrose, rice protein, and food
dyes. When my samples of Fancy Sprinkles arrive, I bake a batch of corn muffins

and blanket them in glitter. Corn muffins
have never been so golden! I pour Champagne Rose Gold Fancy Sprinkles into
my seltzer and toast to my success.
But my cheers were premature. What
I want is sparkly makeup, not muffins.
Attempts to suspend Fancy Sprinkles in
Vaseline are only nominally more successful than my efforts with salt. I can’t
achieve anything like Euphoria’s glittery
tears. Perhaps I’ve been doing needless
work. Maybe cosmetics companies have
already figured this out. Donni Davy’s
exquisite line, Half Magic, hasn’t yet been
reformulated to meet EU regulations—
though she says she’s excited by the challenge. “It’s going to push innovation. It’s
necessary, and ultimately a good thing.”
Davy sends me a synthetic-mica-based
Half Magic Glitterpuck, a shimmery
powder, which has admirable sparkle and
much more staying power than my homemade attempts.
I learn from James Newhouse, head
formulator for the beauty brand Chantecaille, that the company, founded in

I paint on some Nails
Inc Bioglitter polish
and flutter around like
a climate-resilient fairy
1998, has never used microplastic glitter.
He sends me a lipstick that twinkles with
microscopic gold, even once applied. I feel
like Beyoncé. Newhouse, a chemist by
training, explains that its glitter comes
from borosilicate pearl pigment, while the
trio of shadows in Chantecaille’s spring
2024 collection derive their sparkle from
mica from the Responsible Mica Initiative. (Though mica is a naturally occurring
substance, mica mining has historically
been plagued with humanitarian violations, mostly stemming from illegal child
labour.) I’m not a regular makeup wearer,
and my avant-garde assays with Chantecaille’s glittery eye shadows elicit a shrill
scream from my son.
On to more experiments. I call Jeanne
Chavez, veteran of 1990s cult favourite
cosmetics brand Hard Candy, to talk
About-Face, the line she has developed
with her fellow Hard Candy alum Dineh
Mohajer and Halsey (who is “very much
into sparkle and glitter,” Chavez tells me).
Microplastic glitters were never an option.

“We said to our labs: Please don’t show
us anything that isn’t cleanly formulated,”
Chavez says. I smugly sign for a shipment
of lip gloss, plus five vials of loose glitter—in shades like Saint Ceremony, Out
of Body and Ascent—and a number of
glimmery and pearlescent Shadowsticks
and Eye Paint. The glitter in all of them
comes from sustainably mined, finely
milled mica or borosilicate. I murmur in
my husband’s direction about how hope
sparkles eternal if one is only willing to
do one’s research.
This is further proven by my tests of
Gen See, an environmentally conscious
cosmetics company that works with a
sustainable mica mine in Hartwell, Georgia. Gen See Mixed Media Metallic Liquid Eyeshadow is a joy to apply to my
eyelids—which I’ve now become accustomed to blanketing with sustainable gold
sparkles every morning.
I admit to a certain amount of theatricality when I dump a package of pink
glitter directly onto our backyard. But it’s
Bioglitter, the only cellulose glitter that
will actually decompose naturally—thus
certified by European third-party auditors, whom it would be folly to doubt. I
think about gluing some to my nails. But
I don’t have to. Bioglitter is the shimmer
in all of Nails Inc’s Bioglitter polish. I
paint some on and flutter around like a
climate-resilient fairy.
But why not flutter around like a morpho butterfly? The most promising advances in sustainable glitter are perhaps
unsurprisingly based on shimmer in nature: the wings of a blue morpho butterfly,
the feathers of a peacock and kingfisher
and the Pollia berry. All get their remarkable effects from something called structural colour, which relies on microstructures that interfere with light. Two
producers—Sparxell in the UK, ChiralGlitter in Canada—have engineered cellulose nanocrystals that mimic these naturally occurring structures, and both tell
me they’re already in conversations with
cosmetics companies as they work to scale
up production. No matter how often I
check, samples don’t arrive from either,
leading me to believe I overplayed my
insistence that I wasn’t a corporate spy.
In the meantime, I’ll wear my responsible mica and borosilicate sparkles, and
keep faith that the future is sufficiently
bright and bedazzled. And that, thankfully, we won’t have to cause further ecological insult to get there.
vogue india, march-april 2024

41

VOGUE Culture

Shirt, Imran’s own.
Suit, AMAARÉ.
Shoes, GUCCI
42

vogue india, march-april 2024

Soft serve
His untimely disappearance from the big
screen nine years ago may have caused serious
heartburn, but Imran Khan is ready to pick up
where he left off—with a few upgrades. By
SADAF SHAIKH. Photographed by JACKY
NAYAK. Styled by MANGLIEN GANGTE
he year was 2008. I was
15 and coasting on a
h i g h f rom p l ac i n g
among my school’s top
rankers in the 10th
standard board exams.
As a treat, I was allowed
to watch a movie unchaperoned with my
friends for the first time. I was pretty
tepid about a coming-of-age movie starring a bunch of newcomers, but as the
credits rolled I looked at my friend incredulously. Had the sensitive and steadfast Jai Singh Rathore stirred the same
intense emotions in her as he had in me?
“Imran Khan is so cute,” she said with a
smile. Not in the same wheelhouse, then.
Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na became my Roman Empire and I was doomed to spend
my early adulthood searching for my Jai,
only to end up with red-flag Sushants
masquerading as soft boys.
Sixteen years later, when the star walks
into the studio we’re shooting at, I am
once again the teenage girl singing along
to ‘Kabhi Kabhi Aditi’ and insisting her
boyfriend wear white tees under his flannel shirts. The actor is charmingly awkward as we take him through the day’s
schedule—after all, it has been almost a
decade since he last appeared in front of
the camera. He had intended to keep it
that way, he swears, but his self-imposed
mental health sabbatical was overturned
when fans began clamouring for his comeback in the comments section of Zeenat
Aman’s Instagram post.
Khan is aware that his enduring popularity is a remarkable anomaly. “It boggles my mind because I have spent the
better part of a decade tearing down and
denying any vestige of fame,” he confesses. “Someone told me that they grew

up in an abusive environment and my
films made them feel safe. That’s a powerful thing.”
Khan’s career is marked by the quintet of romcoms he starred in between
2008 and 2012: Jaane Tu…(2008), I Hate
Luv Storys (2010), Break Ke Baad (2010),
Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (2011) and Ek
Main Aur Ekk Tu (2012). Through each
of these films—even I Hate Luv Storys,
in which he starts off as the promiscuous
Jay Dhingra but ultimately reverts to his
so-in-love factory setting—the star
chipped away at Bollywood’s angryyoung-man prototype. The gentle and
sincere characters he portrayed signified
a simpler time when women didn’t have
to decode modern dating jargon like
ghosting and love bombing or become
unpaid therapists to emotionally stunted
men. When Imran Khan loved you, you
knew it.
“Yes, but some of those films were not
received well, people wanted to see a different version of masculinity back then,”
he counters. It could also have something
to do with the fact that Khan’s acting was
often called out for being ‘too wooden’.
Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find a character he played that has aged badly—a
distinction that even Shah Rukh Khan
cannot claim to enjoy. (I’m looking at you,
Raj, waving Simran’s bra in her face.) “It
takes someone to write those characters
and scripts; it takes a director who wants
to tell that story,” the actor insists.
Khan is about to change for his first
shot when I wordlessly press the bouquet
I’d picked up on the way to the studio
into his unprepared hands. It’s the first
time I’ve given flowers to a boy—something about Khan’s puppy-dog demeanour elicits that kind of reaction even
though he is now 41—and from the ac-

“Someone told me
that they grew up in
an abusive
environment and
my films made them
feel safe. That’s a
powerful thing”

vogue india, march-april 2024

43

VOGUE Culture

Shirt, ROSANI
44

vogue india, march-april 2024

“In my twenties, I
gravitated towards
stories of young men
trying to find themselves.
Those plotlines made
sense to me because I
was going through those
experiences myself”

Vest, XYXX.
Pyjama suit,
DIVYAM
MEHTA. Socks,
stylist’s own
vogue india, march-april 2024

45

VOGUE Culture
Kurta, pants;
both ROOH BY
RIDHIMAA at
CURATO.
Shoes, GUCCI

46

vogue india, march-april 2024

HAIR & MAKE UP: RAKSHANDA IRANI

tor’s quizzical expression, it seems like this
is his first time in a long time receiving
them. He looks down at the flowers, then
up at me and suddenly flashes that cheeky,
toothy smile of his. “I’m going to place
these on the table over here and take them
with me when I go home, okay?” I nod.
“Okay?” he repeats, as if to stress that he
appreciates this gesture more than he’s
letting on. “Okay, Jai—Imran!” I catch
myself saying.
We break for lunch after we get Khan
to eat a cupcake, pose with a giant bow
(a gift to the girls and gays), put on a knit
sweater and read Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Woman Destroyed—basically a list of
everything chaste that a person would
imagine doing with their boyfriend on a
Sunday afternoon. I suspect the star would
like a moment to himself to recharge
during lunch, but he grabs his salad bowl
and joins the rest of our crew. He catches me up on how he used to be so online,
but now considers the
phone an intruder; how
his frugal lifestyle has
worked wonders; how
his benchmark for success is very different
from what it used to be.
W hen Khan renounced Bollywood in
2015, many assumed it
was due to the string of
flops that had plagued
his career, with Katti
Batti delivering the final
blow. “I simply couldn’t
be bothered to invest the
time, energy and effort
required to stay in this
profession. I couldn’t
bring myself to go to
parties and socialise with
people in the hope that
someone would offer me
a film,” he confesses. “I
felt damaged on the inside and I wanted
to fix that. If you pull a hamstring, you
go to the physiotherapist. You don’t feel
good mentally? Seek therapy.” The actor
has diligently kept his appointments with
his psychoanalyst four times a week for
the past seven years. “This was one of
those defining decisions of my life. If you
speak to someone who has given up an
addiction or gone off alcohol,” he explains,
“they could tell you the exact number of
days they’ve been sober. It’s the same for

me with my mental health. It’s been 2,500
days since I started my analysis on March
13, 2017.”
Having intentionally shunned the
limelight for four years, Khan once again
found himself in the news in 2019 when
media outlets splashed headlines about
his marriage hitting the rocks. Ever protective of his privacy, he chose not to
comment or engage in any way, but his
silence was misconstrued as an admission
of guilt. “I’ve been out of the room for a
very long time. In my absence, it has been
easy to speak about me,” the actor frowns.
He pauses, then nods resolutely to himself
before continuing, “The speculation that
I’m romantically involved with Lekha
Washington is true. I’m divorced and have
been separated since February 2019.” It’s
the first time Khan is speaking about this
on record, and if he’s doing so now it’s
only to quash the vitriol that has been
sprayed on him and his partner. “There’s
this narrative of Lekha being a

“I simply couldn’t be
bothered to invest the
time, energy and effort
required to stay in this
profession. I couldn’t
bring myself to go to
parties and socialise
with people in the
hope that someone
would offer me a film”

on his comeback, but he’s not pounding
the pavement. There’s no desire to rejoin
the rat race or be spotted by paps at all
the right places with all the right people.
If he’s doing this, he’s doing it on his own
terms. “In my twenties, I gravitated towards stories of young men trying to find
themselves—Jai growing into a man, Jay
learning the value of love, Rahul becoming who he’s meant to
be. Those plotlines made
sense to me because I
was going through
those experiences myself.” At 41, a child, divorce and career setbacks later, life looks a
whole lot different. “You
know those films in
which an actor who is
45 years old in reality is
asked by his on-screen
mother, ‘Beta, tu shaadi
kab karega?’ and he retorts with, ‘Arey maa,
mujhe ab tak pyaar naLOOKING BACK
hin hua’? That’s disinFrom left: Khan at a wedding
anniversary (2009) and an
genuous and I don’t
awards function (2011)
want to do that. I want
to play characters that
homewrecker, which infuriates me be- are truthful to where I am in life.”
As we’re wrapping up our conversacause not only is it misogynistic but it
also takes away my agency as an individ- tion, a makeup kit that had been sitting
ual.” He lays out a timeline for anybody precariously close to the edge of the table
asking for receipts: “Lekha and I grew looks like it’s about to tip over and make
close during the lockdown, a year and a for my feet. Almost instinctively, Khan’s
half after I had been separated from hand shoots out and steadies it, remindAvantika and almost a year after she had ing me of the viral TikTok video in which
separated from her partner, not husband a man covers the edge of the table with
his hand when his wife bends down to
as it has been widely reported.”
Buoyed by the affection of his fans, retrieve her fork. Try as he may, there’s
Khan is now reading scripts and working no running away from Jai.

vogue india, march-april 2024

47

VOGUE Culture

DAY 1: 11.30AM
My first view of Club Med Kiroro Grand from the bus is
a sight for sore eyes after over 20 hours of travelling

DAY 2: 9AM
I make my skiing debut on a beginners’ slope. My
instructor tells me I am a quick learner and I
transition to a more advanced slope the next day

DAY 1: 3PM
The window of my room
opens to a cluster of gable
roofs and the pine-covered
mountains beyond

DAY 2: 3.30PM
A local demonstrates how to make traditional
Japanese candy using sugar and honey

Learning to fly
Amidst snowfall, skiing and saké, SHAGUN
JANGID draws warmth from the euphoria of her
first solo trip to Hokkaido’s frigid slopes
48

vogue india, march-april 2024

DAY 3: 10AM
Shopping at the local market in Otaru,
the nearest city to Kiroro Grand

DAY 4: 1PM
Asian hot pot for lunch at The Ogon,
Kiroro Grand’s in-house restaurant

DAY 4: 4PM
A final walk by Otaru Canal
before I bid adieu to Japan’s
wintry wonderland

DAY 3: 5PM
Learning how to make Hokkaido Melon Pan,
a traditional Japanese sweet bread

AS THE PLANE prepares to land in
Tokyo, I tug at my chapped lips, suddenly realising I am all alone in a new country. It’s embarrassing to admit this as a
fully grown adult at 24, but I’m travelling
by myself for the first time and I am a
bundle of nerves. My 20-hour journey
ends in Hokkaido, where Club Med Kiroro Grand emerges from the snow-covered
hills like a cornflake in a bowl of fresh

milk. A glow emanates from the hotel’s
windows and my tropical body is grateful
for the warmth of the indoors.
Getting out from under my blanket
is a herculean task when the temperature
outside is -8° Celsius, but an action-packed
itinerary awaits me at Kiroro Grand. Over
the next three days, I learn how to ski on
a beginners’ slope, bake melon bread with
a chef, relax in an onsen and taste-test

Japanese candy. Each morning, I wander
into the hills for a walk and return with
snowflakes adorning my hair. Dinner is
served to the beat of Taiko drums and is
accompanied by performances staged by
the hotel staff. When I fall asleep, it is to
the view of snow outside my window.
A small smile plays on my lips as I drift
off to dream of days well spent.
— As told to Saachi Gupta

vogue india, march-april 2024

49

VOGUE Culture

Console sisters

IN THE ’90S, being a gamer girl was either a flex (“Ooh, you’re
cart piled high with packets of Bombay Puri while swerving
hanging with the boys”) or a faux pas (“Ew, why are you hang- away from vehicles, I was hit by a wave of nostalgia I didn’t
ing with the boys?”). Any interest I expressed in playing Need expect to find in a simulation. Although the outdoors were
for Speed or Mortal Kombat was regarded with suspicion. Did I closed off to me, in the open terrain of the virtual realm, I was
really want to play or was I secretly harbouring a crush? At 14, free to go where I pleased.
my curiosity about gaming wasn’t serious enough to earn me a
Maybe this freedom to access parallel worlds—so far reNintendo or a PlayStation, and if I somehow managed to get moved from our reality that’s rife with household chores and
my hands on a console, finding narcaregiving—is why women in India
ratives and characters that were repare spending more time online. When
resentative of me as a female player
Although the outdoors were Adi Vyshnavi, who goes by the pseuwas nearly impossible. I did not idendonym Natasha Gaming, began livesclosed off to me, in the open treaming PUBG matches in Telugu
tify with a heavy-chested Lara Croft
nor did I want my only choices on
terrain of the virtual realm, I from the city of Bhimavaram in
Mortal Kombat to be a barely clad
Andhra Pradesh, there was no other
was free to go where I pleased female gamer in sight. Anticipating a
Kitana or Sonya Blade up against the
high-tier Sub-Zero. The only games
barrage of opinions, she concealed her
that were welcoming to women inidentity until she reached 50,000 subvolved cooking, like in Diner Dash, or playing dress-up, like in scribers. “I didn’t want them to bring me down, so I protected
Barbie Fashion Designer.
my passion by staying anonymous,” she says. When the 25-yearDuring the pandemic, after a long break from my joystick, old finally uploaded a video revealing her face, the response was
I beta-tested a game for a friend. The plot was simple: collect surprisingly heartening. “Women who play are expected to look
coins as you rush through a busy bazaar dodging lamp posts, heavily westernised or East Asian,” she says as we jointly watch
vehicles and police barricades. After months of bed rotting, my the video in which she wears a red kurta and a small bindi,
screen opened a portal to the outside world that I felt thankful currently sitting at 3,05,000 views. “I grew up with people critfor. Cycling past the colourful clothes in shop windows and a icising my appearance and the fact that I had a hundred expres50

vogue india, march-april 2024

THEO LIU

India’s female gamers are rewriting
the age-old narrative that views
women as objects of desire or damsels
in need of saving. By PRITIKA RAO

sions a minute. Of course, I wondered about how the internet
would react.” Today, Vyshnavi’s
YouTube following has grown to
an impressive 5,77,000 and she has
morphed into somewhat of a local celebrity.
Sathish, who owns a cyber cafe in the town of Arcot in
Tamil Nadu, occasionally notices young girls walking in with
male friends or brothers. “And they’re quite good at gaming
too,” he admits incredulously. “The only issue is that they aren’t
very comfortable being associated with
a space like this.” To break away from
the perception that competitive gaming is reserved for boys requires a
fighting spirit, which these women
have in plenty.
For Indrani Ganguly, one of India’s
well-known game developers, gaming
is also a way to socialise. “I am queer
and grew up in a household that was
not supportive of my identity,” she says.
Her search for friends with similar
interests led her to online communities
where she began role-playing and
building shared stories with other
users. “I met people who were comfortable being themselves, which normalised everything that I was scared
of expressing,” she recalls. Eventually,

SIMONE GANDHI (INDRANI)

PLAY DATE
Rhea Gupte’s Fishbowl is a
coming-of-age game
featuring women of varying
body types and skin tones

it became a starting point for many of Ganguly’s deepest and
most inclusive friendships. She now runs Duronto Games, a
studio she built with people she met online.
The trifecta of agency, intimacy and a quest for freedom has
coalesced into a framework for some of the most unique female-led games emerging from South Asia. Raji: An Ancient
Epic explores Indian myths and medieval architecture while
tracing the story of a pair of siblings, a bond rarely explored in
video games. Venba follows an immigrant family that discovers
its roots through lost recipes while cooking. Inspired by universal lockdown events, Fishbowl involves spending a month at
home with 21-year-old Alo as she balances self-care, home
chores and staying in touch with loved ones. My favourite, Mala
Sen’s The Palace on the Hill, features ’90s rural India via ancient
ruins, sprawling farms, sleepy
cattle, quirky village folk and tea MY WAY
shops. Sen is a 35-year-old tex- Mala Sen, a textile artist
game developer,
tile artist turned game develop- turned
created The Palace on the
er, whose ability to weave these Hill which is set in rural
intricate aspects of everyday India of the ’90s
rural life into a visual masterpiece won her a grant from the
Indian government.
With protagonists like a sari-clad mother speaking in an
Indian dialect or a young sister
wielding a bow, female representation in the virtual world
has become increasingly diverse.
Rhea Gupte, Fishbowl’s writer,
designer and art director, says
that infusing her coming-of-age
game with women of varying
body types and skin tones
stemmed from her desire to create relatable characters. “I wanted players to choose and fall in
love with realistic avatars who
look like them,” she explains.
A study conducted last year
stated that 41 per cent of Indian
gamers are women, a fact that
tears down the cliché of a bespectacled nerd rage-quitting Call
of Duty or a cool dude groaning at having to give up Assassin’s Creed midway
to spend time with his girlfriend. It’s
hardly surprising. Although women
have always played video games, they
were just never a major demographic
in the eyes of developers, advertisers or
marketers. But in the virtual world they
are now boldly inhabiting, women can
be anything they wish—a fire-wielding
dragon slayer or a mother piecing together a lost family recipe. Most importantly, they can be themselves.
A WOMAN’S WORLD
Indrani Ganguly is one of India’s
most well-known game developers
and runs Duronto Games with the
people she met online

vogue india, march-april 2024

51

Anchors
aweigh
Having moved houses almost every
year of her life, KALYANI ADHAV’s
experiences are proof that home is
not a place, it’s a feeling

EACH TIME I video chat with a friend, I am struck by the
little details in their home as they pace while we talk: a shelf
filled with Happy Meal toys and dog-eared books or a Lladró
figurine that’s missing fingers from the one time they tried to
clean it. When I think of my own home, I draw a blank. As a
27-year-old woman who has moved 22 times across ten cities,
52

vogue india, march-april 2024

I’ve never been attached to a space, bedside or nook. I don’t
bother to paint over cracks in the walls because it feels like a
problem for a more permanent tenant to fix. I avoid speaking
to my neighbours because I probably won’t see them again. Any
kind of physical or emotional investment feels futile because I
am sure I’ll have to leave soon and start from scratch.
I was five years old when I moved for the first time. My
mother had just given birth to my sister—a premature baby—
and had been advised bed rest for eight months. To ease her
burden, I was sent from our home in Nagpur to my Ajji in
Ahmednagar. My parents could not visit me all year, but a
mini fridge full of candy compensated for their absence. I
didn’t know this move would set the tone for the next two
decades of my life.
When the idea of home is so fleeting, you
begin to look for other anchors to moor yourself
to. I was in boarding school when I first started
to document my life obsessively. Realising how
quickly my time there would come to an end, I
photographed everything on my digital camera.
In one photo, a row of books obscures my desk.
I was an avid reader as a child and carried novels
on family vacations so I could read while others
went swimming or skydiving. When boarding
school came to an end, I moved to Canada to
study and realised I couldn’t tote my treasure
chest of paperbacks with me. As I glared at the
space in my suitcase where my books should have
been, I felt a visceral detachment from material
possessions. I stopped reading altogether. Ten
years later, it’s a habit I still haven’t regained.
I may have left my books behind, but my
closest college friend thankfully remains in my
life. When I think of home, my mind goes to her.
When I reflect on recent accommodation choices,
the cramped apartments with peeling walls and
pests dissipate. What remain are memories of us
curled up together on the couch listening to Frank
Ocean’s ‘Pink + White’ on repeat.
Maybe the reason I don’t feel wistful about
these brick cubes is because the people who
turned them into homes are still in my life. Some
come over for late-night games and stay until
breakfast. Others take on the role of parental
figures in the absence of my natal family. In the
house with the piping problems, my building’s
security guard was always a call away to unlock
the gate if I got home past midnight or to get
rid of a delinquent cockroach. I slept better
knowing that someone was happy to go beyond
the call of duty to care for me.
Now, my dream is to live in the same house
for more than two years. I crave that grounding
and feel envious when I see people being able to
pour personality into their homes. Still, I have
never regretted any of my 22 moves. Though the
first few days are unsettling, that discomfort has taught me a
lot about myself. I can look at each space as a clean slate to
forget old mistakes and make new ones. In any case, it isn’t long
before my motley crew of friends arrives, filling the empty rooms
with the sound of their laughter.
— As told to Saachi Gupta

BIKRAMJIT BOSE

VOGUE Culture

Finders
keepers
Keepsakes that follow us
from home to home, across
time, space and reason

1

2

1. ‘Hybrid Fruit Bowl Cloe’,
SELETTI, ₹ 3,539 2. ‘Toucan
Large’ cuddle toy, EO PLAY,
₹ 54,368 3. ‘Kangaroo
Armchair’, CASSINA,
₹ 6,24,746 4. ‘Andy Warhol.
Seven Illustrated Books
1952–1959’, TASCHEN,
₹ 6,630 5. ‘Wooden Doll No. 8’,
VITRA, ₹ 15,747
4

5

3

vogue india, march-april 2024

53

VOGUE Culture

Happily ever laughter
South Asians have long clamoured for a seat at the comedy table. Now, Vidura
BR, Sabeen Sadiq, Hari Kondabolu and Abby Govindan are in on all the jokes
IF LIFE IS a bitter pill we must learn to swallow, then humour
is the Evian that makes it go down easy. Fortunately, South
Asians have always been a funny lot, niftily turning gripes into
gags and pain into punchlines. And perhaps it was this sab
changa si attitude that helped them grow the thick skin required
to endure the stereotypical portrayals of their people in pop
culture. It’s only years later that brown comics have finally
been able to enjoy their well-deserved moment in the sun.

Today, instead of simply expressing gratitude at being in
the room among their white counterparts, diaspora comics
Vidura BR, Sabeen Sadiq, Hari Kondabolu and Abby Govindan are ensuring that audiences are laughing with them rather than at them. Currently located in diffferent parts of the
world, the quartet ask each other unexpected questions in
freewheeling conversations for Vogue India—and answer with
equally matched spiritedness.

Abby Govindan asks,
Vidura BR answers:
You’re extremely gorgeous and funny.
Does your back ever hurt from the weight
of having everything going for you?
Thankfully, I have just enough self-loathing to keep my spine intact. I’ve also invested in a feline companion to remind
me daily that I ain’t shit, lest I forget.
I love that a lot of your gags have a storytelling element to them. What is the
anatomy of a Vidura joke?
This is mostly a result of my inability to
write a good short joke. I subconsciously
resort to wrapping my waffling in a story
to buy myself some extra time to get to
the punchline. I’ll start with a premise
and try to have at least a first draft punchline before I try it out on stage at all. If
things go well, I’ll keep throwing shit at
the wall until I have something resembling a working bit.
Indian comedians typically dominate the
conversation on South Asian comics. Did
any Sri Lankan comics inspire you to start
comedy? Worldwide, they are so few and
far between.
The fact is that there aren’t very many of
us to begin with. Sri Lanka’s entire population would likely constitute little more
than a large town in India. That being
said, I recently visited Sri Lanka and was
pleasantly surprised at there being a bud-

54

vogue india, march-april 2024

ding comedy scene
because I don’t remember it existing
when I left. Nathasha Edirisooriya,
who was arrested in
Sri Lanka last year
for making (very
funny and well-constructed) jokes criticising religion,
should be a role
model for comedians in Western
countries who fuss
about cancel culture. There are very
real restrictions on
speech that people
from other parts of
the world have to
deal with.
At what point did you realise that standup wasn’t just a hobby but something you
wanted to do full-time?
It was around six months after I started
on this path that I finally felt like I had
written a joke that was not abjectly terrible. I continue to daylight as a software
engineer (yuck) for visa and income purposes, but there does seem to be light at
the end of the tunnel.

Who has been the most supportive of
your stand-up dreams?
Without a doubt my cat, although she
does have a vested interest in my success.
That good cat food isn’t going to pay for
itself. As far as humans go, my friends
from medical school—Syam, Steph, Ryan
and Abhik—who, unlike me, went on to
become genuine contributors to society,
always make me feel much more special
than I have any right to feel.

Vidura BR asks,
Sabeen Sadiq answers:
From one curly girl to another, what does
the hair routine look like?
It depends on the weather and what my
hair feels like doing that day. Post-shower, I scrunch all my hair upwards with
mousse, then do a final few scrunches with
argan oil for shine and to lock in hydration. Then I wait ten years for my hair to
air dry, and there you have it: the curly-girl
look.

show is get home as
quick as I can, make a
hot cup of chai, grab a
stroopwafel and watch
a psychological thriller
from the ’90s. I also really want to start watching Peaky Blinders.
Okay, I just realised that
my vice is television.

A lot of your comedy centres around the
subject of religion. What do you think
Allah thinks of your work?
What a fun, light question. InshaAllah,
God is on board with all this. My jokes
don’t make fun of my faith but instead
show how I practise it and how anxious
I feel about society perceiving me as religious. My goal is to demystify what
people think Muslims are like. We’re chill.
We’re out here praying, watching Lord of
the Rings for the first time and eating a
family-size bag of mini Reese’s cups.

What was the first joke
you wrote that worked
and how ashamed of it
are you?

JENNIFER GIRALO (HARI KONDABOLU); ERIN KLAY (ABBY GOVINDAN)

Post-gig vice of choice: booze, pills or the
tears of offended Americans?
None of the above. I feel like I need more
vices. All I have is over-caffeinating and
sleeping at 3am. What I really do post-

My goal is to demystify
what people think
Muslims are like. We’re
chill”—SABEEN SADIQ
I wrote about my mum’s reaction to me
doing comedy at bars. The joke was me
saying, “No mum, I perform in rooms with
men on one side and women on the other, with a curtain in between.” I told that
joke for the first time at an open mic in

San Francisco and when two comedians
in the super-empty bar laughed, I was
like, “Yes, I have struck gold.” Actually, I
still love doing that bit. It makes people
laugh and says a lot about me real quick.
On a scale of one to ten, how upset would
your fans be if your partner was white?
The real disappointment for my fans—and
me—would be if my partner wasn’t Muslim. I’m hopeful that I’ll find one good
Muslim dude in the sea of weirdos who
live on dating apps. It’s a lot of weird energy on there. Recently, a guy’s opening
line was: “Can I braid your hair?”

Sabeen Sadiq asks,
Hari Kondabolu answers:
What’s a conspiracy theory you kind of
believe to be true?
I have a tough time believing that a single bullet killed JFK.
What current mainstream word or phrase
do you love using?
I’m 41 and using any popular new word
sounds awful. I said the word “lit” in a
conversation and apologised immediately.
Many comedians have mentioned that
you have a bit of a punk rock vibe. If you

were in a punk band, what
would be your instrument of
choice?
I’ve thought a lot about this.
I would sing, since knowing
how to is not a prerequisite
in punk rock. I have also imagined myself playing bass
because in my mind (where
I know very little about how
music actually works), the
bass looks cool and four
strings seem easier to learn

vogue india, march-april 2024

55

DADDY COOL
A sketch made by
Kondabolu and
improved upon by
his son’s scribbles

56

vogue india, march-april 2024

Culture VOGUE

than the five or six on a regular guitar.
If one of your jokes bombed on stage,
how would you walk it off ?
I usually address it with the crowd. Perhaps the crowd didn’t agree with my point
of view, didn’t understand what I said or
just didn’t find what I said funny. However, the common experience we all share
is that we were all there when that joke
failed. If nothing, at least we can laugh at
that.
You have a running gag about how much
you love mangoes and how big of a deal
they are in the South Asian community.

How would you react if your son came
up to you and said, “Dad, I hate mangoes”?

“I said the word ‘lit’ in a
conversation and
apologised immediately”
—HARI KONDABOLU
My child is three. If he was 14, I’d assume
it was teenage rebellion. But if he is a
grown adult and says that to me, I would
question my whole existence as a parent.

Have I failed my child so greatly that he
doesn’t have a taste for God’s nectar?
I know you love thrifting. What is your
go-to spot and what’s the best item you’ve
thrifted?
I love to buy and sell clothes at
Beacon’s Closet in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
I probably have several hundred dollars
in store credit at this point. The best thing
I’ve thrifted is probably the orange-red
corduroy shirt I wore on my latest YouTube special, Vacation Baby.
What would you like your last words to be?
Goodnight, everybody. Get home safely.

JENNIFER GIRALO (HARI KONDABOLU); ERIN KLAY (ABBY GOVINDAN)

Hari Kondabolu asks,
Abby Govindan answers:
Do you still get asked, “What do your
Indian parents think of your career
choice?” I hate it because it treats our
parents as monoliths who are unable to
adapt to what makes their children happy.
I don’t personally get that question anymore, but you’re so right. I headlined a
show in New York last year and my extended family was in the front row. Every
time I made a sex joke or a gag at my
family’s expense, everyone in the audience
would peek at them to gauge their reaction. I was like, “Just enjoy the joke-telling. Don’t worry about them, they’re fine.
They’re adults and they love me.”
How old are you and how old do people
think you are? Has this been useful or
detrimental?
I’m 26, but since I’m Indian and a woman, everyone in comedy treats me like I’m
12. I’m still getting used to not being the
youngest person on a line-up. For so long,
my identity was tied to being the “young
one”. That was so silly because I’m a much
better comic now than I was when I first
started six years ago. And I will be way
better six years from now. The most talented comedians I know can hop up on

stage and perform
for an hour as if
they’re telling a funny story at the dinner table. That kind
of talent isn’t made
at the age of 20, it’s
made after 20 years
of honing your craft.
If you could go back
in time, what would
you tell yourself before your first performance?
I would tell myself
to trust the process.
That doing badly is
part of the job and
it’s how I’ll get better. That one day, I’ll be friends with Hari
Kondabolu, the guy whose YouTube videos I used to watch in high school. That
we would be in a Vogue India feature together where he’d ask me silly questions,
like “How old are you?”.
Do you write for a white audience or
people of colour?
I fell into this trap of trying to cater to

certain audiences early in my career, but
these days I find happiness in just writing
what I think is funny. I did the whole
white-people-be-like angle to death and I
have nothing fresh to contribute to that
topic anymore. I’ve tried my best to cultivate a fanbase that is diverse in age, sexuality, ethnicity and life experiences. I want
to be able to walk into any room and make
people feel like they can relate to me.

vogue india, march-april 2024

57

Triptii Dimri’s unfiltered spirit shines through as
she races ahead on her journey to the field of
stars. By ANINDITA GHOSE. Photographed by
ASHISH SHAH. Styled by NIKHIL MANSATA

58

vogue india, march-april 2024

Hoodie, shorts,
shoes; all GUCCI.
Socks, stylist’s own

vogue india, march-april 2024

59

Dress, VERSACE.
Shoes, AQUAZZURA

60

vogue india, march-april 2024

Dress, belt; both vintage
CHANEL at LOVERS
LANE VINTAGE.
Headband, VV
ROULEAUX. Earrings,
necklace; both vintage
CHANEL at SUSAN
CAPLAN. Bangles, ring
(on right hand), ring (on
left hand, middle finger);
all MISHO. Ring (on left
hand, index finger),
DINOSAUR DESIGNS
vogue india, march-april 2024

61

Dress, ERDEM. Shoes,
ROGER VIVIER.
Earrings, MANPRIYA
JEWELLERY. Brooch,
GAZDAR. Belt,
vintage ALAÏA at
RELLIK VINTAGE

62

vogue india, march-april 2024

riptii Dimri is climbing a ladder on the back of into it again a year later while waiting for her flatmate after an
a white trailer. Nobody expected her to do this audition for a deodorant ad. “I was hanging around so we could
in Louboutins. Sneakers are offered. Sneakers
save on rickshaw fare,” she tells me rolling her eyes, flashing her
are refused. This is the eighth hour of the pho- smile, astonished by the contours of her own story. Five rounds
toshoot and she is now swinging off one of the of auditions later, there she was, the romantic lead in a legitimate
rungs. She has the face of a black-and-white
Imtiaz Ali-backed love story.
movie star and the body of a seasoned athlete.
Set in Kashmir, the movie wasn’t a box-office success but
She references her Pahadi roots, being born in the industry took note of Dimri in her pheran-clad glory. “Many
the foothills of the Himalayas. She wants you to know she
people told me not to do an OTT film [Bulbbul] after Laila
doesn’t tire easily.
Majnu because no one knew back then how streaming platforms
A few hours before this,
would fare. But my gut
seated inside another trailfeeling is very strong. I
er with rollers in her hair,
know within the first 15
Dimri tells me that director
minutes of reading a script
Anvita Dutt had once asked
if I want to do something.”
her to observe cats to acThe way she sees it, actors
quire their body language.
spend at least two or three
Having watched her angle
months on each film set. So
her face to the sun all
if they’re not excited to be
morning, I tell her that this
there every day, they’re
assignment seems to have
wasting their time. “It’s the
stayed with her. “You reexperiences that will stay
member the staircase scene
with us, right? Looks will
in Bulbbul where I’m soakgo. Fame will go. Money
ing up the sun? That’s the
will…no, wait, hopefully,
scene I studied cats for,” she
money will stay,” she says,
says. I do remember. Dimlaughing out loud, louder
ri was captivating in the
than the hair.
2020 supernatural thriller,
It’s not hard to believe
a beautifully imagined,
that Dimri is the kind of
dark, feminist fairytale set
actor who is excited to be
in 19th-century Bengal.
on set every day. You tend
Two years later, she had a
to meet her smile before
reprise with Dutt’s Qala,
the rest of her. She is excitplaying a troubled young
ed about her first Vogue
singer. To have titular roles
India cover and aware that
in early films is a nod to her
it is a significant milestone.
calibre, even if it was a miIn what I now recognise as
nor role in the 2023 blockher trademark candour—
buster Animal that finally
this girl wears no masks—
lavished the tag of #nationshe tells me she couldn’t
alcrush on her.
sleep the night before.
This cat is now out of
Eternal student
the bag. A fan on a Reddit
There is a narrative to the
forum laments that his
Shorts, earrings, bag; all GUCCI
images being made today:
‘best-kept secret’ since he
an ingénue on the brink of
saw the trailer of Laila Mastardom, revelling in the last gasps of being incognito. When
jnu (2018) is no longer his own. Dimri’s Instagram followers
shot up by a staggering 320 per cent in the days after Animal ’s you see her prance around in a leopard-print leotard with sneakrelease and the ensuing virality even brought her earlier films ers and tube socks, a leather jacket warming up the mise en
scène, you know she’s a shapeshifter. Wasn’t this someone who
back into conversation.
We steal time between shots while her hair is being teased was just talking about being an introvert and the perils of midfor volume. The light is fading. We are on a tight schedule but dle-child syndrome? Wasn’t she telling me that her stage debut
the newly minted star is calm. She speaks without hurry. Her was in the neighbourhood Ram Leela that her father organises
every year? As stylist Nikhil Mansata notes, she doesn’t have
zen demeanour belies what looks like a breakneck career ascent
for the 30-year-old: five films in six years, including two in the any of the airs of a new-fangled star. “She just seems shanti and
middle of a pandemic. She tells me that she had tried out and chill,” he says.
As a teen, Dimri was not good at grades, neither was she
been rejected for Laila Majnu in 2016 but somehow got pulled

vogue india, march-april 2024

63

64

vogue india, march-april 2024

STYLIST’S AGENCY: THE WALL GROUP. HAIR: CLAIRE MOORE/STREETERS. MAKEUP: DEEPA VERMA. PHOTOGRAPHER’S
ASSISTANT: ANISH OOMMEN. ASSISTANT HAIRSTYLIST: RAKSHANDA IRANI. PRODUCTION: IMRAN KHATRI PRODUCTION

into dancing or singing. She only played tennis—she still does— that it was going to be a small role, but I found the character
which explains her exquisitely toned legs (think Bernini sculp- interesting. If we start making decisions based on what auditures). But Dimri, the actor, is a first bencher with an obsessive ences are going to say, then as actors, we won’t ever be able to
streak. The most stimulating part of a project for her is the do what we want to do,” she states, more vulnerable than deworkshops ahead of the shoot where you build the characters’ fensive. “I want to choose roles that push me out of my comfort
backstories. She’s specific about her lesson plans too: Meryl zone. There’s a lot of advice on offer and I listen to it all, but it
Streep in The Bridges of Madison County (1995) and Priyanka comes down to instinct. I might make mistakes along the way,
Chopra in Barfi! (2012). She believes being nervous on the first but I’m allowed to.”
day of a shoot is a good sign. Her class topper move, however,
In the past, Dimri has been honest about how things didn’t
is that she signed up for an acting workshop after she had already
pan out as she’d imagined after her debut film. She thought
filmed part of Laila Majnu. “I was new to that world and didn’t people would stop her on the street, that fame would be someknow a lot of the terms they were using on set. I struggled thing real and palpable. Instead, she often saw less than 20
during the first schedule,” she shares. In workshops with direc- people in theatres for Laila Majnu in the first week. She was
tor Sajid Ali and co-actor Avinash Tiwary, nothing would reg- heartbroken. It might have been convenient to hold a grudge
ister. “I would go home and wonder if I had picked the right against ‘nepo babies’ but she doesn’t take that bait. They probcareer. Avinash suggested I do a workshop, so I enrolled in The ably have their own struggles to contend with—that onerous
Actor’s Truth by Saurabh Sachdeva and was introduced to a task of filling big shoes—she demurs. She cites examples like
whole new interior world,” she recalls, insisting that acting Kartik Aaryan (who she is cast opposite in the forthcoming
workshops are for everybody, not just
Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3) to say that it’s the
actors. “It opens you up. You ask youraudience who decides. There is much
self important questions that you othself-reflection in the way she looks at
“I know my reasons for
erwise wouldn’t. It can help make you
her journey in the film industry: no
more compassionate as a person… Animal. Sandeep sir [director experience, no connections and no
more real.”
of how to navigate it. At
Sandeep Reddy Vanga] was knowledge
first, she wanted to “do everything…
Animal instinct
clear that it was going to be a even Bigg Boss!”. She just “wanted to
Days after the Vogue India shoot, Dimfamous” but that has now metamorsmall role, but I found the be
ri chats with me over a Zoom call from
phosed into a deeper, more purposeful
her parents’ home in Delhi—a short
character interesting. If we ambition.
stop before commencing a long shootIt is her family that keeps her
start making decisions based grounded.
ing schedule for Vicky Vidya Ka Woh
Dimri grew up in the Air
Wala Video with Rajkummar Rao in
on what audiences are going India Colony in Delhi’s Vasant Vihar.
Dehradun. She drools as she describes
Convincing her parents that she wantto say, then as actors, we
the Pahadi gahat ki dal her mother has
ed to try her hand at modelling was
to make when she visits. “Also these won’t ever be able to do what tough in itself. Persuading them that
little spiced black dal vadas, sambar
she was serious about a career in the
we want to do”
rice…the menu is fixed,” she says, widmovies was entirely different. I ask
ening her eyes.
about the intimate scene with Ranbir
Her meals at home might be cuKapoor in Animal that has earned her
rated, but she’s still exploring her personal brand. In recent a new kind of fan base. “My parents were completely rattled
months, she’s appeared in everything from a sunflower yellow when they saw it. We had to have a long discussion on why that
Cult Gaia dress to a pearl-white Gaurav Gupta lehenga. She’s scene was crucial,” she reveals. But she knows they are proud of
played the lead in a hyper-feminist film and done a highly her. She tells me about the time her father called her on stage
sexualised supporting role in a macho blockbuster. Her playlist during a colony event to address the audience right after Laila
routinely jumps from Billie Eilish to Kishore Kumar. Who is Majnu had released. “He just wanted to show off, but I went
Triptii Dimri? “I try not to think too much about how I should blank. That’s how afraid I was. It’s taken a lot of time for me to
be right now, you know?” she says. She is figuring it out, look- get used to being in the public eye.”
ing for her niche, but hoping not to settle into it too soon. She’s
Now that she’s here, she intends to stay. An old video in
made the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list and won a Filmfare which she talks about wanting to act alongside Ranbir Kapoor
OTT for Best Actor. There has been glory but there have been has gone viral. She believes she manifested this Vogue India
harsh lessons too. Last year, she was invited to the red carpet cover too when she was slighted at that red-carpet event. What
for an event but not to the show itself. It stung. More recent- else does she want to manifest? “A biopic on a yesteryear Indily, she was trolled for playing Zoya Riaz as part of a honeytrap an actor…Madhubala or Meena Kumari,” she says promptly,
sub-plot in Animal. It was confusing. “I’ve only received praise underlining her admiration for both. As captivating as it is to
so far,” she says. After Bulbbul and Qala, people questioned listen to Dimri fantasise about inhabiting characters so far rewhy an actor like her needed to drop her clothes in a men- moved from her reality, it’s clear that she has a sincere sense of
and-guns movie to get ahead. “I know my reasons for doing self. In the smoke and mirrors world of Bollywood, it’s an art.
the film. Sandeep sir [director Sandeep Reddy Vanga] was clear One might even call it a ‘qala’.

Dress, ROKSANDA.
Floral brooches (worn in
hair), VV ROULEAUX

vogue india, march-april 2024

65

Maximum
capacity
Long a source of quiet shame,
the big, messy bag has been
reclaimed as a marker of modern
womanhood. Emily Ratajkowski
gives a few of them a real-world
stress test. Photographed by
LARISSA HOFMANN. Styled
by ALEX HARRINGTON

66

vogue india, march-april 2024

OPEN FOR BUSINESS
It’s in there
somewhere—she just
knows it. Ratajkowski
plumbs the depths of
her mega bag. Top, skirt,
belt; all MIU MIU. Bag,
COACH. Sweater (in
the bag), MICHAEL
KORS COLLECTION

SQUARE DEAL
A tidy little tote splits
the difference between
cool discretion and big,
bold statement-making.
Bag, FENDI. Lipstick,
DRIES VAN NOTEN
68

vogue india, march-april 2024

KEEP IT MOVING
Meltdown? What
meltdown? With a
sturdy bag in her grip,
there isn’t a thing that
Ratajkowski can’t
handle; Bag,
FERRAGAMO. Top,
shorts, shoes; all LOEWE
vogue india, march-april 2024

69

CARRIED AWAY
Have earbuds, a change of
shoes, and a fetching
assortment of purses, will
travel. Bag, MIU MIU.
Dress, ACNE STUDIOS.
Bag (in the bag), ALAÏA

70

vogue india, march-april 2024

GOOD STUFF
Trusting her bag to contain
the chaos, Ratajkowski
takes It-girl insouciance to
an entirely new level. Bag,
LOEWE. Boots, ALL-IN.
Watch, CARTIER. Bag,
shoes (in the bag); all GUCCI

vogue india, march-april 2024

71

SORT IT OUT
The detritus of
contemporary life seems
a lot more dignified
when carried around in
something bright and
shiny, wouldn’t you say?
Bag, BOTTEGA
VENETA. Top, ALL-IN.
Skirt, MICHAEL
KORS COLLECTION.
Shoes, LOEWE
72

vogue india, march-april 2024

NESTING INSTINCT
Ratajkowski lets things go
a little sideways, toting a
bag with a cheery yellow
pocketbook tucked inside
it. Bag, THE ROW. Book,
POLO RALPH
LAUREN. Jacket,
FERRAGAMO. Pants,
MARNI. Shoes, LOEWE.
Ping-pong set (in the bag),
LOUIS VUITTON.
DIOR ‘Gris Dior’ EDP
vogue india, march-april 2024

73

REMAINS OF THE DAY
Clockwise, from top left:
ESTÉE LAUDER ‘Estée
Lauder Pure Color Lipstick’.
FARA HOMIDI ‘Essential
Lip and Face Compacts’.
Agenda cover, LOUIS
VUITTON. DIOR
‘Diorshow Iconic Overcurl
Waterproof Mascara’. Shoes,
LOEWE. Bag, HERMÈS

74

vogue india, march-april 2024

HAIR: TAMARA MCNAUGHTON. MAKEUP: DICK PAGE. PRODUCED BY LEONE IOANNOU/PONY PROJECTS. SET DESIGN: CAZ SLATTERY. PHOTOGRAPHED AT
THE OCULUS AT WORLD TRADE CENTER. MANICURIST: MANICURE BY ELLE GERSTEIN USING CHANEL LE VERNIS. TAILOR: HAILEY DESJARDINS

FAIR SHAKE
Wielding her handbag,
Ratajkowski makes a
joyful mess in a bodysuit.
Bag, HERMÈS. Bodysuit,
H&M. Skirt, BOTTEGA
VENETA. Boots,
ALL-IN. Agenda cover,
LOUIS VUITTON. On
the floor, clockwise from
left: HERMÈS ‘Plein Air
Complexion Balm’. FARA
HOMIDI ‘Essential Lip
Compact’. Shoes, LOEWE.
DRIES VAN NOTEN
‘Refillable Lipstick’.
AERIN ‘Rose de Grasse
Joyful Bloom’ EDP

vogue india, march-april 2024

75

Has the sun set on the
evening dress? Spring
runways offered a lighter,
brighter vision for formal
dressing—one hinged on
daring silhouettes, lots of
embellishments and an
all-in joie de vivre that
rejects the stuffy and stilted.
Photographed by
CAMPBELL ADDY. Styled
by MAX ORTEGA

76

vogue india, march-april 2024

Jacket, MAX MARA.
Skirt, JW ANDERSON.
Opposite page: Shirt,
DOLCE & GABBANA.
Vest, shorts; both STELLA
MCCARTNEY

vogue india, march-april 2024

77

78

vogue india, march-april 2024

On Adut Akech: Top, pants; both
RABANNE. On Samuel Elkhier:
Polo, OUER. Left, on Adut: Top,
skirt; both LOUIS VUITTON.
On Samuel: Top, jacket; both
GIVENCHY. Pants, HERMÈS

vogue india, march-april 2024

79

Top, ARMANI. Pants,
SCHIAPARELLI

80

vogue india, march-april 2024

Dress, jeans;
both GUCCI

vogue india, march-april 2024

81

82

vogue india, march-april 2024

HAIR: LACY REDWAY. MAKEUP: YADIM CARRANZA.
PRODUCED BY VIEWFINDERS. TAILOR: SUSIE KOURINIAN

Top, shirt, skirt; all RALPH
LAUREN. Earrings, DIOR.
Left: Top, skirt; both
MICHAEL KORS. Shoes,
PROENZA SCHOULER

vogue india, march-april 2024

83

LEANING IN
The designer in a rare
moment of rest.
“I am better at working
than talking,” she
says. “If I want to know
somebody, I want
to work with them—
it’s a way of really
communicating a
mindset, ideas.”

Almost everyone refers to Miuccia Prada in the
most formal of ways, but she herself has never been
one to stand on ceremony. WENDELL STEAVENSON
meets a designer who has built an empire in her
own image: iconic, iconoclastic—and enormously
influential. Photographed by STEF MITCHELL.
Styled by ALEX HARRINGTON
IT WAS NOVEMBER and a little windy on the balcony of the Ca’ Corner
della Regina, the 18th-century palazzo that is home to the Prada Foundation
in Venice, where Miuccia Prada was posing for photographs against the backdrop
of the Grand Canal. She clasped a red silk coat (from her very first collection
in 1988) over a citrine sweater, bright and sharp against the grey sky. She wore
no discernible makeup; her long blond-and-auburn hair was unstyled and hung
in soft curls at her shoulders.
Prada, now 74, reminded me of the late Queen of England: a diminutive
older lady, magnificently costumed, who commands a regal presence with a
softly-spoken manner and a genuine curiosity about both things and people.
“Fashion is one third of my life,” said Prada, who has created two celebrated
fashion labels, Prada and Miu Miu, and, together with her husband, Patrizio
Bertelli, helms the Prada Group, a global luxury brand with $4.5 billion in
annual revenue (as of 2022) and over 13,000 employees. The second third of her
life, she says, is “culture and the Fondazione”. Since its creation in 1993, the
Prada Foundation has become a leading proponent of contemporary art. “After,
there is family and friends, and possibly some pleasures.” She paused to reconsider. “Actually, they all overlap. I try to make my life useful.”
Prada likes the word useful; she dislikes the word luxury, which she finds
vulgar. And here is the dichotomy that runs through her life and her work:
Miuccia Prada is an extraordinarily successful fashion designer selling beautiful,
expensive clothes and accessories. She is also a former member of the Italian
Communist Party—with a doctorate in political science—who marched for
women’s rights. “I always thought there were only two noble professions: politicians or doctors,” she told me.
Miuccia Prada was born Maria Bianchi into a well-heeled bourgeois Milanese family in 1949. Her grandfather Mario Prada had founded Fratelli Prada
(Prada Brothers), a leather-goods shop, in 1913; her mother took over the
family business in the 1950s.
“When I was young,” Prada told me, “I always wanted to be different.” She
immersed herself in the activist generation of the 1960s, but she always loved
clothes—while everyone else was wearing jeans at demonstrations, she famously wore Yves Saint Laurent.
And while she rebelled against the bourgeois assumptions of her upbringing,
84

vogue india, march-april 2024

vogue india, march-april 2024

85

TAILOR: OMBRA RENZINI. PRODUCED BY KITTEN
PRODUCTION. PHOTOGRAPHED AT FONDAZIONE
PRADA, CA’ CORNER DELLA REGINA IN VENICE.

“To have an idea of a woman as
a beautiful silhouette—no!” Prada
says. “I try to respect women...
I try to be creative in a way that
can be worn, that can be useful”
she joined the family business, taking it over from her mother
in 1978. That same year, she met Bertelli, the founder of a rival
leather-goods company, at a trade fair. They joined forces, both
personally and professionally (marrying in 1987), and she began
playing around with the idea of a nylon backpack: practical,
lightweight, useful. When it first went on sale in 1984, it was far
from successful, but a high-end brand making a product that
was then considered a cheap, everyday item was groundbreaking.
In 1988, having renamed herself Miuccia Prada, she launched
her first ready-to-wear line. “I’m not even able to draw,” she told
me—but she knew what she wanted to wear, and she worked
with an intuition that suggested a deep reservoir of knowledge.
Prada and Bertelli had a son, Lorenzo, only two months after
that first show. (A second, Giulio, followed two years later.) Her
first collection featured neutrals contrasted with bright colours;
straight-cut masculine trousers and clumpy, rubber-sole loafers;
and a knee-length skirt that would soon become a signature.
Prada opposed the pristine, languid lines of Armani and the
va-va-voom of Versace and Dolce & Gabbana, her Milanese
peers. “To have an idea of a woman as a beautiful silhouette—
no!” Prada said to me. “I try to respect women—I tend not to
do bias dresses, super-sexy. I try to be creative in a way that can
be worn, that can be useful.”
Success was sudden and stratospheric. In 1993, Miuccia
Prada began to design a second label, Miu Miu, with sparkles
and pink and cartoon curves that spoofed girlishness. She also
expanded early into Asia, added a men’s line in 1993, and debuted Prada Sport in 1997, presaging athleisure by a decade or
two. Prada set trends—she never followed them, always chasing
that which was “more interesting, more new, more daring, more
exciting,” as she told me. “Risk is something I kind of like.”
At the same time, Prada cleaves to a kind of no-nonsense
practicality, insisting that “fashion is a little small thing, I think:
get dressed in the morning, and afterwards you do something
else”. Mostly, she wants people to feel “confident—that they
can perform in life. Fashion is a representation of one’s vision
of the world. Because otherwise, I think fashion is useless”.
I met Miuccia Prada for the second time at her apartment
in Milan. The gate was opened by a butler and I was led across
a leafy, cobbled courtyard into a large, modern, vaulted room
separated by huge bookcases into quadrants of seating areas.
Sofas were upholstered in jewel tones, and large modern and
contemporary paintings created blocks of colour on the walls.
We sat at a table painted with an antique map of the world,
with Prada sipping from a cup of herbal tea. When I asked her
what she was reading, she rose, animated, walked away, and
quickly returned with five books under her arm: a history of
women and resistance; a history of fascism; a novel of political
fiction by the late Italian writer Curzio Malaparte; a volume of
Schrödinger bookmarked with a children’s drawing; and a thick
tome of philosophy.
The Prada Foundation is an outlet for Miuccia Prada’s in86

vogue india, march-april 2024

tellectual brio. Conceived and designed by Rem Koolhaas and
his firm OMA (also responsible for the dramatic interior of the
Prada store in SoHo in New York), the Prada Foundation space
in Milan (opened in 2015) was built around an abandoned
distillery and is a very Miuccia mix of iceberg cool and warm
opulence. A gleaming white tower is finished in concrete mixed
with marble dust, the original distillery building (known as the
Haunted House) is gilded in 24-karat gold leaf, and the Podium exhibition space is clad in foamy-looking aerated aluminum
panels. Inside the foundation’s spectacular and almost surreal
spaces, you can grope your way through a pitch-black Carsten
Höller labyrinth, or recoil at a Damien Hirst canvas composed
of dead flies. Wes Anderson designed the café in pistachio and
pink, a pastiche-homage to traditional Milanese cafés.
I asked Patrizio Bertelli why his partnership with his wife
had been so successful. “We never worked because we were
anxious to become famous or rich,” he said. “We worked for the
pleasure of doing something that was interesting and constructive, and to enjoy it, to have fun.”
In 2020, Prada stunned the fashion world by announcing
that Raf Simons, the enormously respected Belgian designer,
would come aboard to codesign the label alongside Miuccia
Prada. The two had long been admirers of each other’s work,
and both spoke of the need for reality, practicality, meaning,
and, yes, usefulness in their collections.
“It clicked in an incredible way,” said Simons. “I think that
we are [both] dialogue people—she likes collaborating, she likes
to work with people—needs it, I think.”
Prada told me that she is very much aware of her age. “It’s
strange,” she said, “because every single morning I have to decide
if I am a 15-year-old girl or an old lady near to death.” But her
creative drive has hardly dimmed. The collaboration with Simons
has blended cool with commercial to critical acclaim, and her own
recent shows for Miu Miu have been cutting-edge and timely.
On that final third of her life—the part that’s about family
and fun—Prada is reticent. While she is the public face of a
global brand, she deliberately has no social media presence, very
rarely appears on television, and often seems shy in public, bowing briefly at the end of her runway shows before disappearing
behind the curtains.
“She looks very reserved,” said Bertelli, “but it’s a question
of privacy—she’s not shy.”
I asked him what made his wife happy. “When she works,
she is happy,” he said. “When she does beautiful things, she is
happy. When she travels, she is happy. When she spends time
with intelligent people, she is happy.”
Lorenzo said that his mother was happiest with her family,
which recently had a new addition: Lorenzo’s first child, a daughter. “Now, for sure, that she has a grandchild,” said Lorenzo,
who gave up a professional rally racing career to join the company in 2017 and is now in charge of technology, marketing,
sustainability, and the company’s new fine jewellery division,
“she is super happy.”
Prada smiled broadly when I asked her about her granddaughter.
“I have to learn everything,” she said, “because I don’t know
the education points today. Also dealing with young kids with
media, telephones, and so on, all the arguments that I don’t
know how to master. I have the responsibility of educating the
girl,” she said.
“I think I will be a good [grandmother]—I will teach, but
I will also be fun.”

HAIR: AKEMI KISHIDA. MAKEUP: KARIN WESTERLUND. MANICURIST: ERI NARITA. TAILOR: LAURYN TROJAN.
SET DESIGN: ANNE AUBERT. PHOTOGRAPHED AT DAYLIGHT STUDIOS.

SHE’S GOT THE LOOK
Gigi Hadid in a glorious
array of archival Prada
and Miu Miu pieces

vogue india, march-april 2024

87

LOUISE TROTTER,
CARVEN

For Trotter’s 2023 debut
for Carven (founded in
Paris in 1945 by MarieLouise Carven), she played
to her own strengths and
that of the house: fashion
and functionality, writ
large, as seen on model
Doutzen Kroes
Shirt, jacket; both CARVEN.
Pants, ZERO + MARIA
CORNEJO

88

vogue india, march-april 2024

There have never been more
female designers—or more
questions about why they
sometimes still need to fight for
their place in fashion. Vogue
celebrates a global cast of
women whose work and
influence speak for themselves.
Photographed by BIBI
BORTHWICK. Styled by
CAMILLA NICKERSON

MARY-KATE AND
ASHLEY OLSEN, THE ROW

Whether they’re feeling minimalist or
maximalist, what’s always right about
the Olsens is their instinct to make it
chic—and to do it with conviction.
On Liya Kebede: Jackets, trousers;
all THE ROW
vogue india, march-april 2024

89

90

vogue india, march-april 2024

PHOTO: VIVIANE SASSEN. SITTINGS EDITOR: TAYLOR ANGINO. HAIR:
TOSH. MAKEUP: LAUREN BOS. PRODUCED BY ROSCO PRODUCTION

MARIA GRAZIA CHIURI, DIOR

For Maria Grazia Chiuri, leading a fashion house doesn’t mean anything if you
only ever put yourself at the centre of it. “From the beginning, the idea was to
show how much fashion is a big community,” says Chiuri, seen above in Dior’s
Paris atelier. “I needed to have other voices to speak about femininity, about
feminism, about values.” From that first collection for spring 2017, with its
clarion call of We Should All Be Feminists (emphasis on ‘we’), she has rejected
the industry’s deification of the solo designer voice in favour of a choir. In her
time at Dior she has worked with, and lionised, everyone from artist Judy
Chicago to designer Grace Wales Bonner to choreographer Sharon Eyal—not to
mention legions of artisans and makers from her native Italy, as well as Mexico,
India and across Africa. For spring 2024, Chiuri looked to witches for inspiration: their wisdom, their intuition, and their connection to nature. “Knowledge
was something that patriarchal society had to take from women,” she says. The
parallels with today’s insidious assaults on women’s agency and freedom aren’t
lost on her. “Fashion is political because it works with the body. There is no other
way to think about it, and that’s central to my work.”—MH

TOMMY TON

REI KAWAKUBO, COMME DES GARÇONS

When Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo burst upon the
scene in 1981, the fashion world had never witnessed anything
like it. Her clothes didn’t depend on darts and seams, and
employed fabrics—rumpled and frayed, some glowing with the
sheen of cheap polyester—entirely new to the Paris runway.
And they were almost always black. Perhaps more than any
other woman designer, she has radically rethought assumptions
about femininity and upended conventional ideas of ‘sexiness’.
If we now accept without question a genderless playbook that
flaunts unfinished hems, asymmetry and overblown silhouettes,
we can thank Kawakubo—who has long since graduated from
that early didactic black to prints and pieces that embrace, with
a heavy dose of irony, proto-feminine polka dots and brocade
blossoms. “I never intended to start a revolution,” Kawakubo
(seen here in Paris in 2023) once said, in a rare public
statement. She just wanted to create, she said, “what I thought
was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion
was different from everybody else’s.”—LYNN YAEGER

vogue india, march-april 2024

91

92

vogue india, march-april 2024

DONATELLA VERSACE

Beyoncé in sculpted chain mail at the
premiere of Renaissance; Amal Clooney in
glittering bronze paillettes at the Fashion
Awards in London; Anne Hathaway—up
next in The Idea of You, early this summer—
seen here in this liquid gold tank dress:
nobody understands evening glamour quite
like Donatella Versace (even if the woman
herself prefers tailored black jackets and
pants of the sort she’s selling in the new
Versace Icons collection, which, she told
Vogue, is “a little reminder about who is in
charge”). Donatella has led Versace for over a
quarter century—few women designers
working today can lay claim to that kind of
longevity (with the exception of her fellow
Milanese visionary, Miuccia Prada). Perhaps
it’s because of her close relationship with her
late brother Gianni that she doesn’t see the
world—or the design studio—in strict
binaries. “Obviously, anyone who identifies as
a woman understands a woman’s body
differently than a man does,” she says, “but all
designers have different strengths. For me it’s
about a strong and confident point of view.
We have to ensure that female voices are
listened to, promoted and championed.”
—NICOLE PHELPS

PHOTO: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ. FASHION EDITOR: MAX ORTEGA. HAIR:
ORLANDO PITA. MAKEUP: TYRON MACHHAUSEN. PRODUCED BY AL
STUDIO. SET DESIGN: MONTANA PUGH AT MHS ARTISTS

On Hathaway: Dress, VERSACE

vogue india, march-april 2024

93

VICTORIA BECKHAM, ISABEL MARANT

One is a former pop star who’s now an established designer; the other is a rock star of a designer.
What got them there was their own look and attitude projected with confidence onto their clothes.
On Kroes, jumpsuit, VICTORIA BECKHAM. Shoes, DEAR FRANCES. Coat, THE ROW. On Kebede:
Jumpsuit, ISABEL MARANT. Shoes, DEAR FRANCES. Coat (used as prop), THE ROW

94

vogue india, march-april 2024

SARAH BURTON,
ALEXANDER
MCQUEEN

Last October, Burton departed the label she oversaw for
13 years with a show that
was a glorious tour de force,
underscoring her strengths:
scalpel-sharp tailoring and
exquisite artisanal effects.
On Kebede: Jacket, pants; both
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

vogue india, march-april 2024

95

On Ratajkowski: Dress, earrings, bracelet; all TORY BURCH

96

vogue india, march-april 2024

PHOTO: TESS AYANO. FASHION EDITOR: JASMINE HASSETT. HAIR: SABRINA SZINAY; MAKEUP:
JANESSA PARE. PRODUCED BY ARTPRODUCTION. PHOTOGRAPHED AT SQUARE DINER

TORY BURCH

In the dozen or so years that Tory Burch has been doing fashion shows, there have been
few minidresses. Pencil skirts and full skirts with sweeping Claire McCardell–like volumes,
yes, but rarely anything above the knees. That changed for spring 2024. “I’m not personally
wearing the short hoop dress,” modelled here in pink viscose jersey by her friend Emily
Ratajkowski, Burch says, “but I wanted to really believe in it and love it, and I spent a lot
of time challenging myself.” Hoops of this sort were once used for crinoline rings; Burch
said she likes the idea of turning what, once upon a time, held women back into something
freeing. “Where women are today,” Burch says, “they’re coming into their own idea of their
own sexuality, their individuality, and when you think about the landscape of how you
address those needs, you need to have diversity.” Thus, it wasn’t all minis on her spring
runway: Burch also showed leg-elongating pants in a coated jersey and nylon taffeta zip
polos—pieces as utterly unencumbered as that little pink dress.—NP

VIRGINIE VIARD, CHANEL

Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel opened her first boutique in Paris
in 1910, long before women in France even had the right to
vote. By the time they finally won suffrage more than three
decades later, she’d built a fashion empire that liberated
women from the trussed-up silhouette of the era. In many
ways, her exacting approach to dressing—unfussy,
unadorned, and unequivocally chic—is right in step with
the current mood, even a century-plus later. That’s not lost
on Chanel’s artistic director, Virginie Viard, the first
woman at the helm of the house since its trailblazing
founder. “Of course Karl raised me,” says Viard of her
long-time friend and mentor Karl Lagerfeld, with whom
she worked for 32 years. (He famously called her “my right
arm…and my left arm.”) “But more and more, I find myself
rediscovering Coco. That sense of freedom and modernity—it feels like her moment now.” Since she took on the
role in February 2019, Viard has shown a keen sense of
how stylish women want to move through the world—
witnesses actor Phoebe Tonkin (right). “When a woman
tells me that she feels good in her clothes,” Viard says, “that
they give her strength and confidence, it’s really the best.”
—CHIOMA NNADI

PHOEBE TONKIN PHOTO: NORMAN JEAN ROY. FASHION EDITOR: ERIC MCNEAL. HAIR, TSUKI;
MAKEUP, GRACE AHN. PRODUCED BY CANVAS PRODUCTION. SET DESIGN: VIKI RUTSCH.

On Tonkin: Dress, jewellery; both CHANEL

vogue india, march-april 2024

97

GILDA AMBROSIO AND GIORGIA TORDINI, THE ATTICO

Gilda Ambrosio (left) and Giorgia Tordini had no work experience in fashion
studios when they launched The Attico with a collection of retro slip dresses
and boudoir-ish robes in 2016. Despite the attention they’d garnered on social
media, the scepticism that greeted their debut suggests that the fashion industry
is more than a little bit sexist. “It’s a paradox,” they say. “Who more than
women know what women want, feel, and need?” Eight years later, their
line—comprising everything from vintage-inflected party frocks to tomboy
cargo pants and sweeping duster coats—is stocked in 250 stores worldwide.
Last September, they staged their first-ever fashion show on a street in Milan’s
chic Sempione neighbourhood. And Dua Lipa and Hailey Bieber have both
been seen wearing pieces from the label’s spring collection.—NP

98

vogue india, march-april 2024

PHOTO: TESS AYANO. FASHION EDITOR: JASMINE HASSETT. HAIR: SABRINA SZINAY. MAKEUP:
JANESSA PARE. PRODUCED BY ARTPRODUCTION. SET DESIGN: JAVIER IRIGOYEN. OPPOSITE PAGE,
PHOTOS: ARMAN NAFÉEI(AMBROSIO AND TORDINI); GETTY IMAGES (GARDENS AND FRAMES)

RACHEL SCOTT, GAËLLE DREVET, AURORA JAMES, EMILY ADAMS
BODE AUJLA, CATHERINE HOLSTEIN

“I struggle with the concept of a woman designer,” says Diotima’s Rachel Scott, “because then
that’s all you are. Men can be geniuses, but women are ‘collaborative.’ ” New York–based Scott’s
work is almost always described in the context of Jamaica, where she’s originally from, and in
relation to the communities she works with for some of her crochet. “But I actually think that’s
more indicative of what it is to be a designer: people working together.” Scott is part of a cohort of
designers whose fantasy is to dress our reality, our everyday. Such is the case of Emily Adams Bode
Aujla, who helped redirect contemporary menswear with her distinctive nostalgic and lived-in
sensibility, which she’s since expanded into womenswear. Ditto Aurora James of Brother Vellies,
whose work with African craftspeople for her New York–based accessories label, and subsequently
through her non-profit organisation, Fifteen Percent Pledge, helped draw a blueprint for creating
sustainable, community-first impact through fashion. See also Catherine Holstein’s Khaite and
Gaëlle Drevet of the Frankie Shop, who have given a new shape to the wardrobe of the contemporary woman. Both separately and together, these designers have defined today’s generation of
American womenswear as both expansive and considered.—JOSÉ CRIALES-UNZUETA
Designers and mannequins wear fashion from female designers including
Diotima, the Frankie Shop, Rodarte, Marina Moscone, Brother Vellies, Bode and Khaite

vogue india, march-april 2024

99

ANEETH ARORA, PÉRO

Before celebrating girlhood became mainstream, Aneeth Arora set out to unpack the idea of femininity. Her
body of work is festooned with French knots, bows, 3D blossoms and buttons—a frill-coded India-meets-Harajuku aesthetic that she references from the pretty little knick-knacks we preserved in trinket boxes as
children. In 2010, when Arora first surfaced with péro, her hand-dyed handloom dresses sans shiny embellishments with the less-is-more craft-focused approach did not find their destined wearers immediately. “I felt like
an outcast when I first started my practice because there was no appetite for clothes that weren’t wedding-related.” Questions arose on whether this overt display of delicate signatures would be relatable to a serious buyer.
But Arora’s modern interpretations of handloom, matched with an intentional approach to every stitch and
seam, have brought her loyal buyers, especially amidst fellow intellectuals like photographer Dayanita Singh
and author Arundhati Roy, who dominate the rooms they step into. Arora has gained success in the Indian
market and beyond without bowing to the bridal industry. Stocked at some of the finest global retailers, péro
has now established a community base in Japan, China and the US. —SHRIYA ZAMINDAR

PHOTOS: SAHIL BEHAL. MAKEUP: KRISANN FIGUEIREDO. HAIR: RAKSHANDA IRANI.
MODELS: RASHMI Z MANN/INEGA (LEFT), KHUSHI RATHEE/ANIMA CREATIVES (RIGHT)

On Mann: Shirt, jacket; both PÉRO

100 vogue india, march-april 2024

ANITA DONGRE,
HOUSE OF ANITA DONGRE

An outfit from Anita Dongre always comes
with a point of view. The lehengas and skirts
will have pockets to give women a practical
solution for their occasionwear, the intricate
embroideries will service local craft heritages,
and the artisans working on executing her
designs are women trained with skills that will
offer them financial independence. “I’ve proudly
fought against society’s gender stigma all my
life and continue to do so. It’s all these
experiences that drive me to work towards the
empowerment of rural women artisans,” says
Dongre. Since starting her eponymous brand in
1995, her rise has been meteoric with four
brands under the House of Anita Dongre,
translating to a three-figure count of exclusive
outlets and standalone stores, and stocks at
esteemed retailers that make her business
empire worth an estimated ₹700 crore or more.
It wasn’t an easy feat. “While as a designer my
journey has been very rewarding, at times it has
also been challenging to be taken seriously as a
businesswoman. Everyone from landlords to
banks and investors wanted to negotiate with a
man. I was the first woman in my family to
work and build my own business.” —SZ
On Rathee: Top, ANITA DONGRE. Shorts,
stylist’s own. Shoes, CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN

vogue india, march-april 2024 101

Taking the long view, the rich list of women
designers working and showing in London spans
generations and ranges from Mary Quant and
Vivienne Westwood to Sarah Burton and Clare
Waight Keller, with each of them honing an
individual, sometimes idiosyncratic, aesthetic.
Dublin-born Simone Rocha (1) is just one of a
contemporary cohort of female designers working
in London with an eclectic point of view. If her
label is defined by an ethereal and poetic reverence
evoking the rituals of modern womanhood, the
South London–born, half-Jamaican menswear
trailblazer Martine Rose (5) is defined by an
off-kilter twist on mundane corporate tailoring
and sportswear. Spellbound fans of Grace Wales
Bonner’s (4) sermonistic shows, meanwhile, bow
down to her colourful and craft-led precision (not
to mention the sell-out throwback sneakers in her
adidas Originals collaboration), pieces constructed
through rigorous academic research that draw on
her Jamaican British heritage. Asian British
designer Supriya Lele (2) infuses the body-flaunting, form-focused pieces in her collections with the
jewel-tone colour palette and details of traditional
Indian dress. No contemporary designer, though,
knows cultish adoration better than Phoebe Philo
(6). Her instantly shoppable return to fashion after
a six-year creative hiatus broke the internet when
Philophiles flocked online to buy sumptuous coats
and waist-grazing tailoring from the first drop of
the ex-Céline creative director’s new eponymous
brand. Of course, Stella McCartney (3) is well
acquainted with the concept of fashion brands as a
global phenomenon. Since its inception over two
decades ago, her label has pioneered eco-conscious
design and has led the industry in innovative
materiality, regenerative farming, and upcycling
long before everybody else began talking about
sustainability.—LAURA HAWKINS
102 vogue india, march-april 2024

1

PHOTOS: ANGELO PENNETTA (SIMONE, VOGUE,
MARCH 2014); GARDENS: GETTY IMAGES

SIMONE ROCHA, SUPRIYA LELE,
STELLA MCCARTNEY, GRACE WALES
BONNER, MARTINE ROSE,
PHOEBE PHILO

PHOTOS: ZOË GHERTNER (GRACE), WILL GRUNDY/KINTZING (SUPRIYA), ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
(STELLA, VOGUE, AUGUST 2004), ANDREAS LARSSON (MARTINE), DAVID SIMS (PHOEBE,
VOGUE, MARCH 2013); GARDENS AND FRAMES: GETTY IMAGES. FASHION EDTIOR: CAMILLA
NICKERSON (GRACE). PRODUCED BY CONNECT THE DOTS (GRACE)

3

2

4

5

6

vogue india, march-april 2024 103

PHOEBE PHILO

She’s back—and how. It’s
fashion (and a business
approach) on her terms: make
it special and unique and in
smaller, more sustainable
numbers. Yet again, she
catches the moment.
On Kebede: Jacket, pants; both
PHOEBE PHILO

104 vogue india, march-april 2024

NADÈGE VANHÉECYBULSKI, HERMÈS

You likely won’t know her
because—as always with the
storied French house—the
team comes first. But her
impeccably made clothes
resonate with intimacy and
intelligence.

HAIR: SOICHI INAGAKI. MAKEUP: CELIA BURTON. PRODUCED BY HOLMES PRODUCTION. SET DESIGN: ROXY WALTON.
PHOTOGRAPHED AT WADDINGTON STUDIOS. MANICURIST: ADAM SLEE. TAILOR: CARSON DARLING-BLAIR

Jacket, top, pants; all HERMÈS.
Earrings, ANA KHOURI

vogue india, march-april 2024 105

CHEMENA KAMALI, CHLOÉ

Every day, Chemena Kamali takes this walk across
Paris’s Pont du Carrousel to get between home and
work—yet these days she could be forgiven for
thinking of her work as a kind of home: Kamali was
appointed creative director of Chloé last October,
the third time she has worked for the brand. Like
any home, it evokes a very specific series of
emotions. When the Düsseldorf-born Kamali, 43,
was interviewing for the job, she told the people at
Chloé: “I’d really like to bring back the feelings I
had when I fell in love with the house in the first
place—and I strongly believe that there are a lot of
women around the world that share that longing,
because Chloé really is an emotional brand.” The
days she is referring to are when she worked on
former Chloé creative director Phoebe Philo’s
design team in the early 2000s, when clothes were
created with absolute intuition. It’s an approach
that informed Kamali’s Chloé, which debuted
during Paris Fashion Week in February. Uppermost
in her mind, though is the spirit that Chloé founder
Gaby Aghion started the house with in 1952.
“Gaby was someone who said, ‘I want to dress
women to feel more free, to feel more at ease, so
you can live your life in them, because you have
stuff to do,’ ” she says. “Chloé doesn’t impose
anything on you; it lets you be yourself. That’s
what’s powerful today.”—MH

106 vogue india, march-april 2024

vogue india, march-april 2024 107

PHOTO: INEZ & VINOODH. SITTINGS EDITOR: TAYLOR ANGINO. HAIR: PAWEL SOLIS.
MAKEUP: SANDRINE CANO BOCK. PRODUCED BY VLM PRODUCTIONS

VOGUE Horoscope

HORO
SCOPE

WATER
SCORPIO

Spoiler alert: the my-way-or-the-highway approach
may have worked for you so far, but it isn’t going to
work for you in the coming months. Keep your ego
in check, beautiful. Learn to step back and observe
your triggers so you can respond rather than react.
Believe us, life is going to be a lot easier when you
learn to work with, rather than against, the team. If
fatigue has been a theme for you, prioritise rest and
rejuvenation. Journal prompt: what are the activities
that help you renew your spirit?

CANCER

Professionally speaking, this is a big manifestation
year for you. A time of watching your dreams and
desires take concrete form. So give yourself a pat on
the back—you’ve come a long way since you first
embarked upon this journey. As such, the opportunity for long-distance travel or relocation may also
be on the cards. If this is something you are consciously working towards, get your paperwork in
order as soon as possible.

It’s official, you’re in your girlboss era. You are focusing on your big goals and vision-boarding like a pro.
There’s so much you want to achieve in 2024, and
you’re just getting started. Tapping into the gift of
the gab is also showing up as a big theme for you, so
create content. Tell your story in your own unique
way. Overheard at the cosmic conference: it’s time
to take that cloak of invisibility off and allow yourself
to be seen, heard and celebrated.

108 vogue india, march-april 2024

‘Medusa Glass Cup’,
LES-OTTOMANS, ₹ 14,289

TEXT: ZOHRA SHAKTI

PISCES

‘Cloudy Butterflies Dish’,
BORDALLO PINHEIRO, ₹ 21,519

HORO
SCOPE

AIR
LIBRA

Eclipse season, who? This month, you’re moisturised, focused and in your
lane. You’re making magic in ways that are divinely ordained. Trust us when
we say that you are going to be noticed for all the right reasons. What you
don’t want to do is give the past any more power than it deserves. Let go
of the old story. This chapter of your life is about tapping into your inner
alchemist and turning your pain into power.

AQUARIUS

You’re in it. You’re in the life you manifested for yourself a long time ago.
So take a moment to turn your gaze inwards and give thanks for the rainbows, sunshine and sparkle. What’s more, you’re feeling connected to yourself and connected to the mysterious forces above. Receiving divine downloads from your spirit guides is also indicated this month. Artists, poets
and storytellers, the Muse is close at hand. Remember to court her and
make her feel special in your unique way.

GEMINI

We hope your passport is ready and your bags are packed because wanderlust is your power word, now and for the rest of the year. Get ready to expand
your mind and your consciousness as well as learn about new cultures and
cuisines. If a holiday romance is something you’re in the mood for, prepare
to be surprised in the best possible way. As for those who are in the process
of relocating, now is the time to get your paperwork in order.

vogue india, march-april 2024 109

VOGUE Horoscope

‘Ancap Wildbird Bubble Vase’,
LA DOUBLEJ, ₹ 75,694

EARTH
TAURUS

This life of ours moves in spirals. Often, we find ourselves at the same
juncture over and over again because there’s some healing to be done, some
more baggage to be shed. So, move into observer mode. Become aware of
the layers you are being asked to shed this eclipse season so you can step
into the most embodied version of yourself. If getting back together with
an ex is something you’ve been thinking about, make sure you revise the
rules of engagement and safeguard your interests.

110 vogue india, march-april 2024

CAPRICORN

We want to let you in on a secret: it’s already yours. Now take the action
you need to take and then surrender the outcome to the universe. Your
spirit team is working overtime to help you manifest that big dream you’ve
consistently been working towards. When it comes to love and romance,
stay open. Destiny is about to bring into your experience a certain somebody
you didn’t quite get to explore things with in the past.

VIRGO

Professionally speaking, this is a significant year for you. There’s so much
to do, so much to achieve. Your superpower is that you trust in your ability
to make the impossible possible. Consider this soulscope as an affirmation
that you will go places and be celebrated for all the right reasons. What you
don’t want to do is make your entire life about work. Remember to find
balance. Remember to nurture your inner child and engage in the activities
that bring you peace, joy and fulfilment.

TEXT: ZOHRA SHAKTI

HORO
SCOPE

‘Coral Bookend’,
L’OBJET, ₹ 99,600

HORO
SCOPE

FIRE
ARIES

You may have started the year with cautious optimism,
but this eclipse season drama is triggering you in
more ways than you can articulate. Quick question:
where are you feeling stuck and what can you do in
order to make a paradigm shift? This is your reminder to tap into the power of conscious creation. As
such, the cards are encouraging you to observe the
conflict between who you are and who you’ve been
told to be. The path of freedom will require you to
let a few people down, and that’s okay. Step into your
villain era stylishly.

LEO

Adulting is hard. You feel like you don’t get paid
enough to deal with all the BS that comes your way.
It’s definitely not something you signed up for when
you boarded the spaceship for the earthly realm.
Here’s the thing, though: things aren’t going to magically sort themselves out. This chapter of your life is
about standing up for what you deserve and asking
for your needs to be met. Don’t be afraid to have
those uncomfortable conversations.

SAGITTARIUS

Dharma, philosophy and spirituality are major themes
for you this year. There’s a burning desire within you
to evolve, to move closer to spirit, to unravel the
mysteries of the multiverse. Remember, the path is
seldom linear. You may have to meander until you
chance upon a guru, teacher or mentor who’s right
for you. Until then, cultivate silence and stay connected to your inner guide. Through meditation and
mindfulness, you will find the answers you are seeking in divine time.

vogue india, march-april 2024 111

WHERE JEWELS
MEET ART

Nestled in the heart of Chandigarh, OMARA
crafts exquisite jewellery that merges timeless
elegance with contemporary flair. Each
piece whispers stories through masterful
craftsmanship, blending intricate details
with rich heritage. From exquisite diamonds
mirroring modern spirit to delicate gemstones
echoing established grandeur, OMARA
adorns women who seek distinctiveness. Step
into OMARA’s world and discover an allure
where artistry meets desire, transforming
jewels into cherished heirlooms.
For more information, visit
www.omara.in or follow
@omarafinejewellery on Instagram

THE BEST OF ANTARCTICA

This year, honour your inner adrenaline junkie with a trip to the windiest place on earth—Antarctica!
Apart from the azure icebergs, exotic penguins and freezing temperatures, the land is home to
one of the world’s biggest mountain ranges—the Gamburtsev Mountains—which stretch out more
than 1,200 kilometres. It’s safe to say that Antarctic travel is an experience unlike any other, but it
might be daunting to plan a trip to such an uncharted territory. Enlist the help of experts at Cruise
professionals to enjoy the best of the continent.
For more information, call 1800-103-0306 or write to helpdesk@cruiseprofessionals.in

VOGUE
Bringing you the best in luxury and fashion
A TRENDSETTING
TIMEPIECE

SPIRAL
SPLENDOUR

Introducing the B.zero1 Kada Bracelet by
Bulgari, an exquisite testament to tradition
and innovation. Crafted in dazzling yellow
gold, this India-exclusive creation is a symbol
of strength and determination, echoing the
rich cultural heritage of the traditional kada.
Embracing the visionary codes of B.zero1, its
spiral design embodies movement and light,
evoking a sense of empowerment. Designed
to be more voluminous than its counterparts,
it offers versatility for both casual and formal
wear, making a bold statement with every
ensemble. Celebrate the essence of modern
India with this captivating blend of tradition
and contemporary style.
For more information, visit
www.bulgari.com
112 vogue india, march-april 2024

Inspired by their beloved Raquel watch,
the House of Fossil has designed a
sophisticated and fashion-forward timepiece
that revolutionises the act of telling time.
The Raquel watch ring features a distinctive
rectangular shape, a sunray watch face and
easy-read indices. The ring comes in three
colours—silver, gold and rose gold—and
with a flexible band that conforms to any
ring size, ensuring a stylish and comfortable
fit. Whether you’re looking to revamp
your jewellery box, add a little edge to your
monochrome outfit, or just enjoy collecting
unique pieces, this ring is bound to impress.
For more information, visit
www.fossil.com/

WIND DOWN
WITH A WHIRLPOOL

Elevate your self-care routine with a relaxing soak
in the Lexa whirlpool tub, expertly designed with
the Trigene filtration system by Artize. Being
the first of its kind, the 3 stage Trigene system
ensures that you’re surrounded only by the
cleanest water while you soak away your worries.
Brilliantly engineered with a UV filter, O3 infuser
and a Carbon filter, the tub is effective against
all microorganisms. Offering convenience with
cleanliness, the tub is fitted with an automatic
heating system that maintains the temperature
while you relax. Invite resplendent rejuvenation
into your life by investing in the perfect upgrade
for a happier you.
For more information, visit
www.artize.com/in/

EMERALD
ENCHANTER

Watchmaker Daniel Wellington brings
a timeless, unisex watch that speaks
volumes without saying much. The
Bound watch is known for its clean lines
and is characterised by a rectangular
and curved case that perfectly
matches the strap’s width. Made from
316L stainless steel and genuine Italian
leather, the watch features GL22
Japanese quartz movements, polished
links, and chrome-free leather. The
sleek, minimalist design is perfect to
subtly elevate your looks.
For more information, visit
www.danielwellington.com/

SHINE
YOUR LIGHT

With Women’s Day right around the
corner, there is no better time than now
to treat yourself and splurge on a piece
of jewellery that can elevate every outfit.
Our pick is The Groove to Less Diamond
Necklace from Melorra. This high-polish
yellow-gold necklace has a catchy design
with multiple triangular motifs attached,
encrusted with precious diamonds in a
prong setting. This beautifully-crafted
14-karat diamond necklace from the
Classic Minimalist collection is dainty,
stylish and ideal for every occasion, making
it a versatile piece to add to your arsenal.
Available at select offline and online
Melorra Stores.

NEW STORE ALERT

Designers Falguni Shane Peacock have opened their
flagship store in Kolkata, expanding their retail network
to seven stores in India, including Mumbai, New Delhi,
and Hyderabad. Designed by none other than celebrity
interior designer, Gauri Khan, the store is a testament
to luxury. The two-level, 4500-sq-ft store boasts brass
monogrammed tables, Falguni Shane Peacock rugs, and
monogrammed wallpaper from the home line, along
with a grand outdoor chandelier, all custom-designed.
For more information, visit
www.falgunishanepeacock.in

FOR THE LOVE OF
CELEBRATION

Copitas, nestling on the 21st floor of Four
Seasons Hotel, Bengaluru is ‘the’ spot
for a celebratory tipple. The recipient
of several accolades, Copitas has won
the 38th spot on Asia’s 50 Best Bars,
the fourth spot on India’s 30 Best Bars
list and Best Hotel Bar in India. Its new
Manager Jonas Vittur, brings his eclectic
and distinguished experience bartending
in hotspots like London, Tokyo and
Hamburg to this Bengaluru favourite.
With panoramic views that are perfect
for the gram, Copitas is the ideal spot for
unwinding, promising an unforgettable
night of fun and flavour.
For more information,
call +91 96064 87958

Jonas Vittur,
Bar Manager, Copitas

INDIAN FASHION’S
LATEST ADDRESS

In the thriving epicentre of fashion in the
Middle East, Dubai Mall stands as the
quintessential hub for discerning fashion
and luxury lifestyle enthusiasts. Here,
celebrated Indian haute couture icon
Manish Malhotra inaugurated his flagship
store at the prestigious Fashion Avenue
on December 10, 2023. The exquisite
5,000 sq ft ivory-clad, palatial store
unfolds ‘The India Story’. Every corner
of the store represents the essence of
India—from the timeless chikankari of
Mijwan to the fine craftsmanship of
zardozi and his signature sequins.
For more information, visit
www.manishmalhotra.in
vogue india, march-april 2024 113

MANE
CHARACTER
MOVES

AN ODE TO LOVE

This Valentine’s Day, the House of Breguet pays tribute
to the day of love by adorning the iconic Reine de Naples,
issued in a limited edition of 28 pieces. A celebration of love,
this classic timepiece features subtle red accents delicately
scattered across the dial, a flange set with 66 hand-set rubies,
complemented by a bezel featuring a myriad of diamonds and
a crown adorned with a cabochon-cut ruby. The best part?
The red leather strap and the sapphire-crystal back of the white
gold case reveal its platinum oscillating weight, showcasing the
Côtes de Genève decoration and meticulously hand-finished
in the Breguet mechanism.
For more information please visit www.breguet.com

In Bollywood’s beautyforward space, American
Hairline is the secret sauce
behind age-defying locks.
Resulting in glam like
never before, they’re at the
forefront of a tech-driven
transformation. Their ultra
natural-looking hair patches
are made of 100% human
hair—a perfect match for your
natural strands. If it’s a luxe
look, it’s American Hairline.
For more information, visit
www.americanhairline.com

VOGUE

DIARY

CELEBRATE EVERY
MOMENT

Experience the epitome of nightlife at 54 Underverse,
the avant-garde nightclub by Sayaji Hotels, Indore.
Immerse yourself in a fusion of pulsating beats, dazzling
lights, and an electrifying ambience that sets the stage for
unforgettable moments. Whether you’re seeking a vibrant
evening with friends or celebrating a romantic occasion, 54
Underverse offers a sophisticated yet lively atmosphere.
Elevate your nightlife experience in this embrace of luxury
and entertainment.
For more information, contact +91 7389910959

FLAUNT YOUR
TRESSES

With the warmer seasons approaching us,
frizzy hair problems are non-negotiable.
Keeping that in mind, let us introduce you to
Schwarzkopf Professional’s Bonacure Frizz
Away Smoothing Oil. With the power of
Babassu oil, which contains Vitamin E that
repairs hair damage, this serum detangles
your mane, smoothens the hair shaft and
tames frizz for up to 72 hours. Moreover, its
All-Day Shield protects your hair from heat
damage and helps you flaunt your tresses in
the summer humidity.
For more information, visit
www.nykaa.com
114 vogue india, march-april 2024

LEGACY OF GRACE

Celebrate the enduring power of time and tradition
with the Timex Women’s Waterbury Legacy twotone watch. This timepiece, inspired by the legacy
of the Waterbury Clock Company, established
in 1854, embodies craftsmanship and elegance.
The two-tone stainless steel case and
bracelet flow together in perfect harmony,
while the blue dial and gold-tone bezel exude
understated sophistication. A tribute to the
resilience of women, wear this timeless piece
as a daily reminder of strength, tradition, and
the beauty found in simplicity. Perfect for every
day, it’s a classic symbol of enduring grace.
For more information, visit
www.shop.timexindia.com

FORM IV

(See Rule 8 of The Registration Of Newspapers (Central) Rules, 1956)

Statement about ownership and other particulars about newspaper
VOGUE INDIA (English) as required to be published in the first issue
every year after the last day of February.

1. Place of Publication

Conde Nast (India) Private Limited
Unit Nos. 3A & 4, 20th Floor, One
Lodha Place, Senapati Bapat Marg,
Lower Parel, Mumbai,
Maharashtra, 400013

2. Periodicity of its Publication

Bi-Monthly

3. Printer’s Name

Parul Dawar
for Conde Nast (India) Private Limited.

Nationality

Indian

Whether a citizen of India ?

Yes

Address:

A Wing, Flat no 1602,
Great Eastern Gardens,
LBS Road, Kanjurmarg West,
Mumbai 400078

4. Publisher’s Name

HERITAGE REIMAGINED

Thomas Crick, a venerable British shoemaker since 1830, unveils its
debut in India, infusing a legacy of opulent craftsmanship into the local
fashion landscape. The brand offers premium men’s leather footwear,
redefining high fashion for the discerning Indian market. With roots
deeply embedded in British design ethos, the brand curates a diverse
collection marrying timeless sophistication with contemporary allure.
Be it a formal affair or a casual rendezvous, Thomas Crick promises
unmatched innovation, comfort, and style, poised to captivate
consumers seeking unparalleled value and quality.
For more information, visit www.thomascrick.in/ or follow
@thomascrickindia on Instagram

UNSTOPPABLE
YOU!

Forget fragile fades and midday
touch-ups. L’Oréal Paris Infallible
Matte Resistance rewrites the
rules with 16 hours of unstoppable,
bold colour. Imagine conquering
your day without a thought to
your lipstick, whether it’s slaying
presentations at work, enjoying
rooftop soirées with friends, or
exploring vibrant new corners
of the city. This velvet-textured
liquid, infused with hyaluronic acid
for comfort, glides on weightlessly
and empowers you to conquer
life’s little curveballs in style. Explore 10 irresistible shades, from
boardroom nudes to fiery reds, and discover lips that truly resist
everything – no flaking, no smudging, just the unstoppable you.
For more information, visit www.shop.loreal.co.in

Parul Dawar
for Conde Nast (India) Private Limited.

Nationality

Indian

Whether a citizen of India ?

Yes

Address:

A Wing, Flat no 1602,
Great Eastern Gardens,
LBS Road, Kanjurmarg West,
Mumbai 400078

5. Editor’s Name
Nationality

Rochelle Pinto
Indian

Whether a citizen of India ? Yes
Country of origin

India

Address:

8-G2 Siddharth Apts, Tonca Caranzalem,
North Goa, Goa - 403002

6. Names and addresses of
individuals who own
the newspaper and
partners or shareholders
holding more than one per
cent of the total capital.

Advance Magazine Publilshers Inc.
One World Trade Centre,
New York, NY 10007-0090

I , Parul Dawar, hereby declare that the particulars given above are
true to the best of my knowledge and belief.
Sd/Signature of Publisher
Date: March 1, 2024

vogue india, march-april 2024 115

VOGUE Shoplist
FASHION
Acne Studios (www.acnestudios.com)
Alaïa (www.maison-alaia.com)
Alexander McQueen (www.alexandermcqueen.com)
All-in (www.all-in-studio.com)
Amaaré (www.amaare.in)
Ana Khouri (www.anakhouri.com)
Anissa Kermiche (www.anissakermiche.com)
Anita Dongre Kala Ghoda, Mumbai, 84258-80425.
Mehrauli, Delhi, 92057-47355 (www.anitadongre.com)
Aquazzura (www.aquazzura.com)
Armani (www.armani.com)
Bodements (www.bodements.in)
Bottega Veneta DLF Emporio, Nelson Mandela Marg,
Vasant Kunj II, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi
(www.bottegaveneta.com)
Bygone Echoes (www.instagram.com/bygoneechoes)
Carven (www.carven.com)
Cecilie Bahnsen (www.ceciliebahnsen.com)
Chanel (www.chanel.com)
Charles Jeffrey Loverboy (www.charlesjeffreyloverboy.com)
Chloé (www.chloe.com)
Christian Louboutin (www.christianlouboutin.com)
Christopher Esber (www.christopheresber.com)
Clé de Peau Beauté (www.cledepeaubeaute.com)
Coach (www.coach.com)
Curato (www.curato.in)
David Koma (www.davidkoma.com)
Dear Frances (www.dearfrances.com)
Dinosaur Designs (www.dinosaurdesigns.com)
Dior Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai 022-67499091. DLF
Emporio, Delhi 011-46005900 (www.dior.com)
Divyam Mehta (www.divyammehta.com)
Dolce & Gabbana (www.dolcegabbana.com)
Erdem (www.erdem.com)
Etro (www.etro.com)
Fancì Club (www.fanciclub.com)
Fendi (www.fendi.com)
Ferragamo Shop No. 121, Ground, Floor, DLF Emporio, 4,
Nelson Mandela Marg, Ambience Island, Vasant Kunj II,
Vasant Kunj, New Delhi (www.ferragamo.com)
Givenchy (www.givenchy.com)
Gucci Emporio Mall, Delhi 022-5033242. Palladium,
Mumbai 022-50323242 (www.gucci.com)
Hermès A15, Bharat Insurance Building, Horniman Circle,
Fort, Mumbai, 022-22717400 (www.hermes.com)
H&M (www.hm.com)
Imli Dana (www.imlidana.com)
Isabel Marant (www.isabelmarant.com)
Jade (www.jadebymk.com)
Jennifer Behr (www.jenniferbehr.com)
Jimmy Choo (www.jimmychoo.com)
JW Anderson (www.jwanderson.com)
Khaite (www.khaite.com)

La Lumière (www.lalumiereindia.com)
Loeffler Randall (www.loefflerrandall.com)
Louis Vuitton DLF Emporio, Delhi 1800-103-9988. The Taj
Mahal Palace & Tower, Mumbai, 1800-103-9988. No.
20-24, UB City, #24, Vittal Mallya Rd, Bengaluru, 1800103-9988 (www.louisvuitton.com)
Loewe (www.loewe.com)
Lovers Lane Vintage
(www.instagram.com/loverslanelondon)
Maje (www.majeindia.com)
Marni (www.marni.com)
Masha Popova (www.masha-popova.com)
Max Mara (in.maxmara.com)
Michael Kors (www.michaelkors.global)
Misho (www.mishodesigns.com)
Miu Miu (www.miumiu.com)
Moschino (www.moschino.com)
My Almari (www.myalmari.in)
Off-white (www.off---white.com)
Ouer (www.ouer.studio)
Paloma Wool (www.palomawool.com)
Paris Georgia (www.parisgeorgia.com)
Péro (www.instagram.com/ilovepero)
Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini
(www.philosophyofficial.com)
Phoebe Philo (www.phoebephilo.com)
Polo Ralph Lauren (www.ralphlauren.global)
Proenza Schouler (www.proenzaschouler.com)
Rabanne (www.pacorabanne.com)
Ralph Lauren (www.ralphlauren.global)
Rellik (www.relliklondon.co.uk)
Roger Vivier (www.rogervivier.com)
Roksanda (www.roksanda.com)
Rosani (www.rosaniworld.com)
Rooh by Ridhimaa (www.roohbyridhimaa.com)
Sandy Liang (www.sandyliang.info)
Shivan & Narresh (www.shivanandnarresh.com)
Skims (www.skims.com)
Stella McCartney (www.stellamccartney.com)
Susan Caplan (www.susancaplan.co.uk)
The Row (www.therow.com)
Thom Browne (www.thombrowne.com)
Tom Ford (www.tomford.com)
Tory Burch (www.toryburch.com)
Two Extra Lives (www.instagram.com/two.extra.lives)
Valliyan (www.valliyan.com)
Versace (www.versace.com)
Victoria Beckham (www.victoriabeckham.com)
VV Rouleaux (www.vvrouleaux.com)
Valentino (www.valentino.com)
Victoria Beckham (international.victoriabeckham.com)
XYXX (www.xyxxcrew.com)
Y/Project (www.yproject.fr)
Zero + Maria Cornejo (www.zeromariacornejo.com)

The merchandise featured editorially has been ordered at the above stores. Some shops may carry a selection only. Prices and
availability were checked at the time of going to press. But we cannot guarantee that prices will not change or that specific items will
be in stock when the magazine is published. We suggest that before visiting a shop you call to make sure they have your size.
116 vogue india, march-april 2024

KEEGAN CRASTO/PUBLIC BUTTER AT INEGA TALENTS.

JEWELLERY & WATCHES
Amrapali Jewels (www.amrapalijewels.com)
Cartier (www.cartier.com)
Chand Begum (www.chandbegum.com)
Gazdar (www.gazdar.in)
Manpriya Jewellery (www.manpriyajewellery.com)
Sabyasachi High Jewellery Veer Narimran Road, Mumbai,
90827-45220. Lake Road, Kolkata, 98303-92673. Mehrauli,
Delhi, 7604-06764 (www.sabyasachi.com)
Swapna Mehta (www.instagram.com/swapna_mehta)
Tiffany & Co. (www.tiffany.co.in)
Violette Joaillerie (www.violette-joaillerie.com)
WELLNESS & BEAUTY
Aerin (www.aerin.com)
Dior Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai 022-67499091. DLF
Emporio, Delhi 011-46005900 (www.dior.com)
Dries Van Noten (www.driesvannoten.com)

Estée Lauder (www.esteelauder.in)
Fara Homidi (www.farahomidi.com)
Louis Vuitton DLF Emporio, Delhi 1800-103-9988. The Taj
Mahal Palace & Tower, Mumbai, 1800-103-9988. No.
20-24, UB City, #24, Vittal Mallya Rd, Bengaluru, 1800103-9988 (www.louisvuitton.com)
CULTURE & LIVING
Bordallo Pinheiro
(www.bordallopinheiro.com)
Cassina (www.cassina.com)
EO Play (www.eo.dk)
La DoubleJ (www.ladoublej.com)
Les-Ottomans (www.les-ottomans.com)
L’objet (www.l-objet.com)
Seletti (www.seletti.it)
Taschen (www.taschen.com)
Vitra (www.vitra.com)
vogue india, march-april 2024 117

VOGUE In List

‘Louis Vuitton Side
Trunk MM’, LOUIS
VUITTON, price
on request

Scale up your road-trip style with new glamping essentials like this
all-encompassing handbag from Louis Vuitton. There’s room for one
more cookie with your cache of cards in this outdoorsy tool kit
118 vogue india, march-april 2024

PEYTON FULFORD

Trunk obsession

NOV
2019
150

AUG
2019
150

THE VOGUE
WATCH
REPORT
2019
Timepieces
to binge on

WHAT’S YOUR
BEAUTY
CARBON
FOOTPRINT?
It’s time to
find out

A N U S H K A
S H A R M A

DEEPIKA
PADUKONE

CREDIT HERE PLEASE

WOMEN of the YEAR
2019

U N F I L T E R E D

(and the men we love)

000

BEFORE IT’S IN FASHION, IT’S IN VOGUE!

SEPT
2019
150

APR
2018
150

MAY
2018
150

SKINCARE

Everything
you didn’t
know

SRIDEVI:
A VOGUE
TRIBUTE

20
RULES

for the
summer
bride

GREATEST
HITS

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Pharrell Williams
and the art of playing it cool

68

YOU CAN
HANG
WITH US
KYLIE
JENNER

FASHIONABLE
FINDS THAT
WON’T BREAK
THE BANK

KARLIE
KLOSS
SHWETA
BACHCHAN
NANDA

+

THE
MILLENNIAL
SPECIAL

MORE

ADITI RAO
HYDARI*
* we’ll have what she’s having

GUEST EDITED BY SABYASACHI
STARRING PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS

Inside
their lives,
minds and
wardrobes

PHOTO: BIKRAMJIT BOSE/VOGUE INDIA

BEFORE IT’S IN FASHION, IT’S IN VOGUE!