Swedish high-street giant H&M has announced its latest fashion collaboration, this time with Indian designer Anamika Khanna.
The second designer from the continent to team up with H&M – Sabyasachi Mukherjee was the first in 2021 – Khanna is bringing her distinctively colourful voice to a wider audience with a collection that took 15 months to develop.
While it may not be lavished with the hand-stitched, patchworked surfacing that has made the Kolkata designer a darling of Bollywood – her designs have been worn by Priyanka Chopra, Ranveer Singh, Janhvi Kapoor, Kareena Kapoor and Karan Johar to name just a few – the collaborative collection still features the colourful, layered patterning she is so well regarded for.
The capsule launches in select countries on September 5. In the UAE, it's priced from Dh219 to Dh1,299.
Having launched her namesake brand in 1998, Khanna has gained a stellar reputation for her intricate wedding and occasion wear, as well as her ability to seamlessly blend Indian and western sensibilities. For this H&M offering, she shifts away from the complex construction of much of her work and instead leans into a more relaxed silhouette.
She brings traditional Indian staples such as kaftans, kurta pyjamas, lungi skirts and cropped choli blouses, then folds in more international elements, including blazers and hoodies, in a way that feels balanced and true to form. Her rich, intricate patterning – often built up in dense layers of patchwork – has been distilled into a more high-street-friendly format of computer-generated patterns digitally printed on to the clothes.
Without losing any of her flair for combining different elements, here she uses foliage, insects, painterly circles and snippets of landscapes to create imagery that feels dynamic and fresh. The clothes don't lean either to the West or East, but somehow nod to both in a seamless blending of cultures.
A yellow kaftan is covered in a complex collage of mandalas, trees, insects and hand-drawn flowers that are cut up and reconstructed into new shapes. On the men's pyjama suit – in a fluid silk-style fabric – the patterning is an all-over melange of polka dots, buta (known as paisley in English), circles and trails of foliage in shades of blue, that then reappears on a women's cropped shirt and loose pyjama trousers in autumnal tones of orange, yellow and green.
Another pattern arrives on the chest of a long-sleeved version of a choli – the cropped blouse usually worn with a lehenga or sari – and as a wide band at the waist of a tulip skirt, and caught at one hip.
A pair of straight-cut, dark blue trousers for men, meanwhile, have a cheeky machine-embroidered face on the ankle, while a blazer has a stitched figure on the breast pocket that carries the same hand-drawn charm as figurative village embroidery from Bihar in eastern India. This same style of embroidery also sits as a wide collar on a woman's jumper.
Khanna said this felt like an opportunity to bring Indian fashion to the fore. “I have always felt that Indian fashion gets lost when interpreted globally. Often, it is regarded as costume or not wearable or modern enough. This collection has given me an opportunity to take something Indian in essence and make it contemporary, for an international audience.”
The latest capsule comes two decades after the first-ever H&M designer collaboration, with Karl Lagerfeld, sparked a new era of shopper frenzy. The list of big names that have signed on for tie-up collections reads like a who's who of fashion and includes Balmain, Lanvin, Alexander Wang, Rabanne, Versace, Maison Margiela, Jimmy Choo and Diane von Furstenberg. It has also included smaller, more regional designers such as Lebanese Sandra Mansour in August 2020, South Korean Rok Hwang in April this year, and Good News, the British footwear company, in March 2021.
