1. What inspired the idea behind Love Letters to Bombay?
Love Letters to Bombay came at a very emotional time for both of us. About a year and a half ago, my sister left her career at J.P. Morgan in New York and moved back to Mumbai. In just over a month, I’ll be making the opposite journey as I move to New York for my master’s.
When she first came back, she would constantly tell me how much she missed New York. How the pace was different, the energy was different, and how Mumbai just didn’t feel the same anymore. So I told her, “Okay, let me make my case for Mumbai.”
Over the next few months, we found ourselves going back to all the little rituals we’d grown up with. Cutting chai during the monsoons. Gola by the beach. Vada pav after long drives. Walking through old neighbourhoods we’d stopped noticing because they’d become so familiar. Somewhere along the way, we didn’t just revisit the city- we fell in love with it all over again.
People always say, “New York or nowhere.” But after everything this collection made us rediscover, we realised something.
For us, it’ll always be Mumbai or nowhere.
2. Why was it important for you to celebrate Mumbai through a contemporary fashion collection?
While working on this collection, we kept coming back to one question: does an Indian fashion brand have to make ethnic clothing to tell an Indian story?
For us, the answer was no.
We believe cultural storytelling doesn’t begin and end with the garment. It can live in the styling, the imagery, the campaign, the references and the world you build around the product.
India is much more than textiles and embroidery. It’s the food we grow up eating, the rituals we barely notice anymore, the objects we see every day and the memories attached to them.
That’s what we wanted to celebrate. The clothes remain contemporary, but the storytelling is unmistakably Indian.
3. How did everyday elements like nimbu mirchi, Maaza, gola and vada pav find their way into the designs?
One thing we kept thinking about while working on this collection was how every generation dresses differently, but somehow the little rituals never change.
Our grandparents wore saris. Our parents wore kurtis. Most of us have grown up wearing western clothing. But every generation has still hung a nimbu mirchi outside a new home. Every generation has had cutting chai during the monsoons, gola on summer afternoons, Maaza while watching cricket, Rajnigandha flowers at celebrations and Kolhapuris sitting somewhere in the house.
Those aren’t trends. They’re memories. They’re traditions. They’re the little things that quietly get passed down without us even noticing.
The sad part is that we often don’t recognise their beauty until somebody else does. A Kolhapuri suddenly feels fashionable after it appears on an international runway. Henna becomes cool once it’s embraced abroad. We wait for our culture to be validated before we start celebrating it ourselves.
We wanted to do the opposite.
Instead of making those objects the product, we made them the world our products live in. Through the styling, imagery and storytelling, we wanted to remind people that these everyday rituals were always worth celebrating. We just needed to start looking at them differently.
4. How do you balance modern silhouettes with distinctly Indian cultural references?
For us, the product has never been the brand. The product is only one part of it. A brand is the world people step into when they discover it, and we wanted that world to feel deeply, unapologetically Indian.
We never believed Indian storytelling had to live only in a garment. It lives just as much in the memories we all carry with us whether it’s asking your father for cotton candy at Juhu Beach or the cutting chai that somehow tastes better when you’re standing outside the office with your colleagues during a five-minute break, the Rajnigandha flowers outside the temple, the Kolhapuris waiting by the door the nimbu mirchi to ward off evil/ protect us from nazar
Those are the things that shape us and become so familiar that we stop soaking them in altogether.
That’s the balance we were looking for. The clothes speak a contemporary design language, but the stories they tell will always be unmistakably Indian.
5. Did your personal journeys between Mumbai and New York influence the collection in any way?
Completely.
I think you only realise how much a city has given you when you’re about to leave it.
For the last few months, every place we went carried a different feeling because we knew one of us wouldn’t be here much longer. Suddenly, things we’d walked past a hundred times didn’t feel ordinary anymore.
Love Letters to Bombay became our way of carrying a part of home with us.
It's a reminder that no matter where life takes us, the city that shaped us will always remain at the heart of everything we build.
6. What do you hope people take away from Love Letters to Bombay when they wear the pieces?
More than anything, we hope people fall in love with the ordinary again.
We hope the next time they see a nimbu mirchi outside a shop, stop for cutting chai during the rains, walk past Rajnigandha flowers at a market or slip into a pair of Kolhapuris, they don’t see something ordinary.
They see something worth holding on to.
Somehow, we’ve reached a point where we wait for somebody else to tell us our culture is beautiful before we believe it ourselves.
We hope this collection reminds people that it never needed anybody else’s approval.
It was always enough.
And maybe if we start celebrating these little things today, they’ll still be around for the generations after us to celebrate too.