Ritu Kumar to return to India Couture Week with ‘The OG’

Eponymous designer Ritu Kumar will return to India Couture Week to present ‘The OG’ on July 26 in New Delhi. The collection will celebrate the brand’s over half-century of craft heritage with designs reimagined for a modern audience. 

“Join us as we unveil our Couture’23 collection in which the legacy stays intact while the mood mirrors the style of today’s India,” announced Ritu Kumar on Facebook. The brand has shared memories working with artisans in decades past to give a hint of craft techniques which will feature in the 2023 couture collection.
 
For ‘The OG’, Kumar’s son Amrish Kumar led the design process and was inspired by Ritu Kumar’s mood boards from previous decades, Vogue India reported. Lucknow’s traditional Kalabattu embroidery will feature heavily in the collection with vintage tomes and refined silhouettes. The couture showcase will mark the brand’s first large-scale showcase since Reliance Retail acquired a 52% stake in the label in 2021. 

“Wars were fought with the French, the British, and the Dutch on trade routes to take textiles out of our country,” Ritu Kumar told Vogue India. “We have a very old connectivity of chemistry of understanding yarns, the alchemy of dyes- no other country has it. And the fact that we’re still doing that is phenomenal.”
 
The 16th edition of the Fashion Design Council of India’s India Couture Week is sponsored by Hyundai and will run from July 25 to August 2. The fashion week will run in association with Reliance Brands Limited across locations in New Delhi.