Raw Mango presented its Fall Winter 2026 collection, It’s Not About The Flower, at London Fashion Week — marking a significant chapter for the Indian textile-led brand.
Presented by De Beers Group and featuring Forevermark Diamond Jewellery, the show was less about spectacle and more about perspective. At its heart lay a simple, deeply South Asian object: the garland.
From Flower to Garland
For founder and designer Sanjay Garg, the inspiration was cultural rather than ornamental. In South and Southeast Asia, flowers are rarely given as solitary stems. They are threaded together — for births, weddings, rituals, farewells. They are communal, layered, plural.
“We are a country of garlands,” Garg reflects. “It’s not about one individual flower; it’s about the plurality.”
That idea shaped the collection’s philosophy. Instead of isolating a motif, the garments explored arrangement — how elements come together, how beauty is constructed, and how value shifts when something moves from singular to collective. The focus moved from surface embellishment to deeper textile inquiry.
Challenging What ‘Indian Fashion’ Means
Showing in London was not about repositioning identity for a global audience. If anything, it was about clarifying it.
“There is still a strong association between Indian fashion and heavy gold embroidery or maximalist ‘bling’,” Garg notes. “Indian fashion is too often measured by how many hours it took to make something, rather than by the aesthetic integrity of the weave itself.”
With this collection, Raw Mango stepped away from stereotype. Silhouettes suggested how a garland rests on the body — draped, circular, weightless yet intentional. Hand-assembled florals appeared in unexpected silk-like fabrics, delicately placed over brocades, rib-knit cottons, quilted rayon, and wool felt. The craftsmanship was evident, but it did not shout.
A Front Row of Cultural Voices
The presentation drew an eclectic audience spanning art, fashion, and culture, including artist Anoushka Shankar, former UK First Lady Akshata Murthy, filmmaker Gurinder Chadha, and singer Arooj Aftab, among others. The collection asked not to be decoded through expectation, but experienced on its own terms.
For Garg, the geography mattered less than the integrity of the work. “Presenting here is as good as presenting in Kanpur for me,” he says. “The work doesn’t change according to who is viewing it, or where.”
Eighteen Years of Textile Language
For nearly two decades, Raw Mango has built its design vocabulary by working closely with India’s weaving clusters, drawing on century-old techniques while shaping a contemporary aesthetic. That commitment — to material, to provenance, to quiet evolution — defined this London moment as much as the garments themselves.
