A SOFTER REVOLUTION

Prabal Gurung talks to Ekta Sinha about telling his truth on his own terms in his 2025 book Walk Like a Girl: A Memoir

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At a time when fashion is increasingly reckoning with questions of identity and authenticity, Prabal Gurung's Walk Like a Girl: A Memoir feels both timely and quietly radical. But beyond its cultural context, the book is anchored in something more personal, his lifelong relationship with femininity. Long before the term became a statement, it was simply the way he moved through the world, shaped by the women who raised him and the softness he refused to unlearn.

From refusing to dilute his name to make it more palatable for a Western audience to redefining what it means to occupy global space as a South Asian designer, Gurung’s journey has been one of both intention and instinct. With this memoir, he turns inward, reclaiming femininity not as performance, but as power, an act of choosing tenderness in a world that often rewards hardness. At the Kolkata Literary Meet 2026, he speaks with the kind of clarity that comes from having nothing left to prove.

For a designer who has spent decades navigating a largely Western fashion system, Gurung’s understanding of self has never been reactive. It has always been rooted. “We all recognise what the mainstream wants us to be,” he says, acknowledging the pressures that shape creative industries. But for him, the answer is anchored in memory and belonging. “My roots, my continent, this part of the world, especially India where I grew up, that is my identity. I can’t shy away from that, and I never want to.”

That refusal manifests in both the obvious and the understated. In the silhouettes that carry echoes of multiple worlds. In the emotionality of his garments and in decisions that might seem small, however, are anything but. “Even something as simple as refusing to shorten my name came from that place,” he says. “I didn’t want to become something that’s convenient for others.”