Kartik Research continues to garner a huge amount of attention across the fashion sphere, debuting on the first day of Paris Fashion Week 2024 to present its Spring/Summer 2025 collection.
Continuing to provide a platform for South Asian talent, Kartik Research, headed by Kartik Kumra, celebrates the bold and beautiful aspects of Indian culture, blending elements of everyday necessities and casual sportswear with elevated tailoring and cultural traditions. A true representation of South Asia’s diverse culture.
The runway, which took place on Tuesday 18th at 4pm, showcased 24 immaculate looks, all displaying fabrics co-crafted by local craftsmen over the last few months. From patterned and sequinned workwear jackets to ornamented blazers, donned with innate embroidery, and patchwork denim, the collection proved to be a success in every sense, highlighting Kartik’s immaculate craft which is becoming more and more recognisable across the globe.
For this collection, Kartik Research also worked alongside Converse to customise Converse’s iconic Chuck Taylor — used as a canvas for creativity and experimentation. The Converse team worked with a Delhi based NGO called Naari Shakti, a female focused platform who specialises in jute bracelets alongside promoting female professionals to empower each other, reworking an American classic with Indian artisanship.
Speaking on the collection, Kartik Kumar stated: “For this season I wanted to capture this spirit through the clothing. We worked a lot with handwoven khadi fabrics. These are fabrics with a lot of character and you can really feel the level of human effort that goes into making them. It’s also a fabric that is closely tied to our independence movement. It became a symbol of Indian uprising. It was a tool to reinstitute national pride in the Gandhi independence movement, and in a full circle way it is becoming the cornerstone of a new Indian cultural awakening.”
“For this run, I worked with Converse and travelled to Bagru Rajasthan to work with hand block printers. We worked with the Titanwala Museum and their archive of blocks to print on the pairs of Converse. We also worked with expert Aari embroiderers. A technique where typically smaller pieces of fabric (in this case, a pair of shoes) are attached to a net which in turn is tied to a wooden frame. Tiny beads of glass, thread and ornaments are then hand embroidered onto each piece. We worked with a technique called Zardozi threadwork to add texture and dimensionality to the pieces.”
Take a closer look at Kartik Research’s SS25 collection in the gallery above.