HITTING REFRESH

Six years after she had a stroke, designer Anamika Khanna is taking the slow and steady route to turn her couture and pret labels into global hits

- Pooja Singh

This is not the Anamika Khanna I met a few years ago. Back then, the Kolkata-based designer stuck to crisp one-line answers, and was uninterested in explaining herself. She preferred to let her work do all the talking.

The Anamika Khanna sitting before me this Friday afternoon, a few weeks before heading to New York to style Isha Ambani for the Met Gala, is chatty without oversharing. The collar of her oversized white shirt is up, her black trousers are tailored like a salwar, and the whole look is complemented by killer heels, blow-dried black hair and freshly manicured red-gel nails. It's this effortless feminine-yet-androgynous personal style that extends to her work.

"This is AK 2.0," says Khanna, the force behind the eponymous couture brand and ready-to-wear label AK-OK. "(There is) a 180-degree change in the way I now approach life and work," she says, before excusing herself to take a call from a client.

We are at her store in Kala Ghoda, Mumbai's arts district-turned-fashion hub where designers from Anita Dongre to Gaurav Gupta have built elaborate stores in heritage buildings. Khanna's store is in one of the more modern buildings. Lines of garments hang on exposed railings, surrounded by blank white walls—a rare sight of minimalism in a sea of stores adorned with chandeliers, elaborate wallpaper and plush carpets.

Khanna, 53, who started her career in Kolkata with an eponymous couture label in the late 1990s, stands out in the world of fashion entrepreneurs. She was the first woman in her traditional Marwari family to go to college (Loretto in Kolkata), work, and build one of the country's large couture brands. Her aesthetic is nonconformist—she peels back the layers of traditional silhouettes, rearranging them to create something unique that pushes you to see classic design in a new light.