RITU KUMAR The First Lady Of INDIAN FASHION

Anamm Inamdar traces the journey & contributions of the pioneering designer

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There are names that have defined Indian fashion. And then there is Ritu Kumar, who didn't just define it, but carved it from scratch when the idea of Indian fashion itself was an undefined canvas. With two tables, four hand-block printers, and a fierce belief in India's textile traditions, she sparked a movement with her brand. Today, more than five decades later, that movement has grown into a fashion empire with over 100 stores, several diffusion lines, and a legacy that continues to shape our sartorial story.

Kumar's journey began in the late 1960s in a village near Kolkata. While studying art history and museology, she came across Serampore, a village once central to the textile trade along the Ganges. What she discovered were Indian prints that England had appropriated, mass-produced in Lancashire, and sold back to India, while the original artisans were left jobless. That moment of injustice became the catalyst. “These designs were being replicated abroad, and the Indian craftsmen were left destitute,” she Ananya Panday recalls. “It became important to bring it back home.”

So she did. Armed with conviction and a deep respect for indigenous crafts, she began to revive forgotten techniques such as zardozi, phulkari, amli, kalabattun, while collaborating directly with artisans across India, often in remote villages. And what began was a lifelong mission: to document the visual language of India’s textile culture and reintroduce it, not just to the world but back to Indians themselves.

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