From college classes to Paris Fashion Week: Meet self-taught designer Kartik Kumra
‘My first love was football; still is,’ says the 25-year-old, laughing. Yet his clothes, with subtle touches of ancient Indian crafts, are now a hit worldwide.
Rapper Kendrick Lamar and actor Paul Mescal have worn his oversized shirts and linen jackets on red carpets. He showed his latest collection at Paris Fashion Week in June.
His New York store opened five months ago, with a second wing set to launch soon.
It is hard to believe that Kartik Kumra is 25, and self-taught.
It’s even harder to believe how he got his start: during the pandemic, while still in college.
In five years, his brand Kartik Research has gone from a soft launch out of his parents’ home to a listing in Time magazine’s 100 Next and a brand stocked in 70 stores worldwide, including Selfridges in London and 10 Corso Como in Milan.
How did he do it? It helps that Kumra’s aesthetic is uniquely Indian, while his designs are global.
His collections focus on crafts that Indian weavers, printers and embroiderers have excelled at for centuries: chikan work, block-printing, fine wool-silk blends. But the tips of the hat to these traditions take subtle forms: tiny details embroidered onto the corners of a black linen shirt; a jacket with a near-invisible print.
There is something on every piece, Kumra says, but it’s restrained. “This makes the clothes versatile. Some see cultural roots. Others just like the aesthetic, fit and drape,” he says.
Kumra was raised in Delhi, by a career counsellor and a businessman. Football was his first love, he says. “If I’m being honest, I still love it more than I love fashion,” he adds, laughing.
After school, he headed to the UK for further study and began a small side hustle, reselling sneakers to students. “I would source cool items over the weekend, and sell them at a markup,” he says.
He was 16 at the time, but as he scoured the high street for good deals, he noticed that independent design labels were thriving. He was fascinated by these clothes, which felt true to a particular vision. “These labels sold at stores such as Dover Street Market. The idea of creating something that belonged at that level intrigued me,” he says.
He then moved to the US, to study economics at University of Pennsylvania, and the pandemic hit. Campuses shut; students returned home. “Many of my friends began to sign up for internships with financial consultancies, but I didn’t want to do that: work all night, from home. That seemed horrible,” Kumra says.
This is when he began to think, again, of the clothes he had seen in the stores in London. He knew it wouldn’t be hard to make clothes like those in India. The mastery was there; in many communities, unique skill was still a way of life.
He had about ₹5 lakh saved up too, from his sneaker earnings. His parents weren’t sure where he meant to go with this, but were convinced enough by his business plan to encourage him to give it a shot.
Thus armed, Kumra began to plot his next few moves. He started by visiting artisans across parts of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, often travelling with his mother, because he didn’t yet have his driver’s licence. He would talk to the artisans, explain what he needed, and simply place his order for a very specific set of garments.
His first collection consisted of 20 shirts and jackets, crafted in this way. “Nice pieces but not as good as what we do now,” he says, smiling.
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He didn’t have high hopes for his label. He didn’t even think of it as such, really.
“My thought was, let me just try and see where I can take this,” he says. He was serious about giving it everything he had, though.
He shot a lookbook at a cricket field near his Delhi home, with real models. He spent hours posting images, crafting Reels and engaging with his tiny audience on Instagram. He remembers the thrill he felt when he hit 100 followers. (@kartikresearch currently has over 118,000 followers on Instagram.)
Then an agent called. It was as surreal as the call from Time magazine in September, he says. Both times, he wondered if it was a scam.
Greg Hewitt turned out to be a wholesale agent who hosts a small independent showroom during Paris Fashion Week each year. He had seen Kumra’s work on Instagram and thought it had potential. He believed he could find his garment space at stores such as Selfridges and 10 Corso Como.
“I was still a student. My mother (Sujata Kumra) was still helping me with everything,” he says, laughing. But he wasn’t about to say no.
The first order the agent placed turned out to be a big one: shirts and jackets with embroidery, block printing and hand work worth ₹40 lakh. He and his artisans had eight months to deliver. “We didn’t have any sort of system or supply chain in place so we just put everything together to make it happen,” Kumra says.
He sketched the designs, then sent them to artisans in Rajasthan for the block-printing, Gujarat for the wool-silk weaving and Uttar Pradesh for the chikan work.
“We had to deliver and we did,” Kumra says. “This was a clear sign to us that we were onto something. That maybe we have the chemistry right.”
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How does a kid from Delhi simply “become” a designer?
“I watched YouTube videos,” Kumra says, a sense of disbelief still in his voice. He looked around for inspiration and found it, in streetwear designers such as Virgil Abloh from Illinois (who trained as an architect) and labels such as Off-White, “which made aesthetic streetwear seem achievable for people without a fashion background”. A key inspiration, he says, are the clean lines and minimalism of the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto.
Where in the early days, Kumra just turned up at workshops, paid advance sums to earn trust, and placed intricate orders, he now works with 60 groups of artisans, visits them regularly, and collaborates to refine pieces and discuss larger orders.
Kartik Research is still a small outfit: three other designers; a PR team and external agencies for sales. A small team makes it more personal; everyone is focused on the art, Kumra says.
That sense of deep personal attachment is something he has noticed in the artisans.
“That kind of connection beyond capitalism and growth inspires me,” he adds. “I believe it is when we start to view what we do in this way, as part of a larger quest for balance, that we find our path.”
