June 5, 2023 |
When translated from Sanskrit, ‘Karu’ means ‘artisan’, the hands-on vocation embedded in the heart of a fabric-first label that prides itself on the preservation of Indian handicraft and intimate collaborations with masterful craftspeople all around its motherland. We’re talking about Karu Research, the Delhi-based brand established in 2020 by autodidactic designer Kartik Kumra.
A one-man-operation carving a neoteric niche in the ever-evolving arena of modern menswear, Kumra, 22, recontextualizes the techniques used to make clothing over 200 years ago, for the now. Ensuring that a high degree of quality and expertise permeates each and every garment, he’s built relationships with all sorts of artisan from handloom weavers in Andhra Pradesh and Bengal, to hand embroiderers in Delhi and Bengal, to natural dyers from Karnataka and Odisha – all in a bid to orient Karu Research as a label with the goods to reach a “heritage” brand standard. “Because we’re based here [in India], we have the chance to really focus on developing something unique – from scratch – and as a result, when you see the product in person, it becomes evident that it’s not just craftsmanship; these are people [artisans] that are at the top of their games,” Kumra explains as we chat over Zoom.
Working with a small-batch production framework, the brand is invested in creating its own, unique fabrics alongside these aforementioned artisans. “The Ajrakh blockprinters [who print patterns using engraved wooden blocks] that we work with are some of the best in the country,” the designer says. “My hand embroidery guys are [usually] designing $10-20,000 Indian lehengas and the amount of skill it takes to not make holes when you’re doing the embroidery [is incredible]. There’s an element of precision [to their work] that is at a really high level and [that’s why] I’m trying to work with these people.”
Each season, Karu Research honours India’s rich history. The result is a glowing tapestry of clothing that recontextualizes Indian traditions for a global audience while reflecting the realities of modern India responsibly and through an authentic lens. This was actually one of Kumra’s leading reasons for sinking his teeth into design in the first place; he had observed a lack of South Asian cultural capital on a global scale and in terms of the diaspora, and wanted to, instead, build something significant and seeped in Indian pride.
Making clothes was only ever meant to be a hobby, a passion project unfurling alongside Kumra’s pursuit of an economics degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Always more of a self-prescribed “maths guy”, Kumra has no former training or prior professional experience in the fashion industry; but when the pandemic hit during his sophomore year, just like the lot of us, he was forced to return home to Gurugram, India, and with ample time on his hands he veered a little left-field. Rather than focus on matters of money and maths, Kumra decided to build a brick and mortar capital-F fashion brand before he’d even passed his final exams. “It was a good time to take a risk and try something that I otherwise, just wouldn’t,” he recalls
Kumra didn’t drive, so at first, his mother ferried him around the Indian countryside, travelling to different artisanal clusters in order to better understand the processes and the value that artisans place on their craft. He spent day after day cold-calling dyers and Kantha embroiderers that he found through expos organised by India’s craft council, vying to be taken seriously.
His first season, Karu Research was picked up by a number of reputable retailers. “That was when I realised this wasn’t a hobby anymore”, Kumra says. When Ssense put in its first order, the designer conceded to the unforeseen success and new reality of the supposed-to-be-side-project: “This was my life now”. Suddenly, Kumra was a lauded designer and the owner of a label with global reach.
Fast forward two years and Karu Research is gunning for glory with its camp-collared shirts, embellished double knee trousers and bohemian paisley jackets having been worn by the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Lewis Hamilton and Joe Jonas; its designs stocked by enviable retailers including Mr Porter, 10 Corso Como, Bloomingdales, Ssense and Selfridges to name a few. Earlier this year, Kumra was even listed as a semi-finalist in the 2023 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers as well as in Forbes’ 30 under 30 list for Asia.
In the time that it takes some uni students to choose a major, Kumra had fleshed out a globally-reaching fashion brand essentially by himself – not bad for a company born out of pandemic boredom. Now, Kumra’s name is tingling on the tip of every fashion insider’s tongue, proving that a formal fashion education is anything but necessary for a newcomer to find their footing in the fashion fish bowl.
Dubbed Zindagi Chuno – which translates to ‘Choose Life’ – the AW23 Karu Research collection takes existential inspiration from the 1995 cult classic film, Trainspotting. When smackhead protagonist Mark Renton – as played by Ewan McGregor in Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel – plunges into a pervasive, nihilistic monologue snarlingly scrutinising consumerism’s existential void. With an air of Schopenhauerian pessimism regarding the nature of human existence, Renton scoffs, “Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television… Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.” He continues, “Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?” Renton’s rant taps into prevailing anxieties over the spiritual bankruptcy of Western consumerist society and options stepping off of what Schopenhauer called the wheel of Ixion on which us humans are seemingly trapped, with one desire leading to another in a degrading, neurotic repetition of the unfulfillable quest for happiness.
Kumra riffs off this, creating a wardrobe for the important occasions that young people living in Delhi face and the disparate coming of age narrative that affects kids in India, as opposed to the typical Western narrative disseminated by the global media. “I was designing this collection whilst I was preparing to graduate from college. What was on my mind was that I had to now figure out life as an adult and you have to make certain choices about how the next few years in your life are going to look.” Kumra recalls. “The big one was whether Karu [Research] had the legs to be a real thing – that’s always a gamble when it’s a small business – [as well as] moving back to India, setting up a business, hiring people, building an office… Then around that you have to figure out your own life, your social life, you’re kind of rebuilding everything in a new place. So that’s where it came from – that translation made sense at that point in my life. And the movie is one of my favourite movies and so I wanted to represent that through an Indian lens.”
Cinematography by Dolly Devi.
Similarly building off of Kumra’s adolescent experiences at an English boarding school, the aesthetic and silhouette is informed by his friends of the time: a troop of skaters who frequented charity shops and sported beat-up, distressed cardigans al la Trainspotting. Zindagi Chuno offers casual shirting and loose-fit trousers in warm, exuberant hues. One key piece is a shirt hand-painted with a brush and natural dyes using a technique called Kalamkaari. “Initially it has this terrible smell and then we have to wash it with vinegar, water, salt and do that a few times at home because it’s really bad,” Kumra explains. “We do get rid of it so if someone buys it it won’t smell like that but it’s an interesting fabric to deal with and there’s a lot of work to maintain it that has to go into it.” Elsewhere there are needle-and-thread hand-quilted pieces that take “a ridiculous amount of work” to complete, as well as a Bandhani tie-dye technique – where one shirt has about 1000 knots before dyeing with natural pigments up to three or four times over to reach completion – used to make certain styles.
Sustainably oriented, 90 percent of the fabrics used in the Zindagi Chuno collection don’t require a single watt of electricity for production while 20 percent are upcycled and 80 percent aew naturally dyed or created for Karu from scratch.
Right now, Kumra is “putting out feelers” for Karu Research’s own retail destination – possibly in New York or London – expanding its cinematic capacity, and ideally bringing in an office and team to delegate to. For the time being though, the designer always has to be turned on and tuned in. “Right now, it’s pretty much get-up-and-go,” he confesses. “I wake up and my phone is filled… It’s just crazy.” Watch this space.
Photography by Nishanth Radhakrishnan.
