Certain cities remain with you long after you have left them behind. Not merely as memories or postcards, but as emotional imprints that quietly continue to inhabit your senses. Their colours, silences, textures, fragrances, and histories begin to linger somewhere within you. Over the years, I have realised that my relationship with travel has very little to do with tourism. I travel merely to absorb, to observe how culture shapes aesthetics, and how the past influences the evolution of a civilisation.
As a couturier, I have always believed that true luxury is never superficial. It is layered with memory, craftsmanship, romance, and identity. That is why multiculturalism has fascinated me endlessly. The world’s most enduring artistic movements were born through exchange between empires, geographies, and ideas. Persia influenced India, Europe romanticised the East, and the Ottoman world absorbed influences from every civilisation it encountered. In many ways, I believe my own work exists somewhere within this eternal conversation among several cultures, not as a history lesson but rather as exquisite expressions of visual joy.
Among the many places I have travelled to over the decades, three cities continue to influence me consistently—Paris, Milan, and Istanbul. Each speaks an entirely different visual language, yet all three have profoundly shaped my understanding of elegance and creativity.
Being an avid and hungry photographer, I have also always travelled with a camera close at hand. Photography, for me, has never merely been about documenting places. It is about preserving moments that move me emotionally. I often find myself drawn towards details most people would walk past—ageing doorways, faded signboards, worn marble surfaces, fragments of forgotten typography, or shadows dissolving softly across textured walls at dusk and of course, other people. Sometimes these images remain quietly within my archives for years before resurfacing unconsciously in a collection or the mood of a show.
Paris, especially the quieter, non-touristy Paris, has always felt to me like the spiritual home of refinement and indeed, the birthplace of Couture. Every time I arrive there, I experience a certain stillness within the madness. Paris never tries too hard to impress you; its seduction is far more intelligent than that. The city understands restraint, detail and quiet confidence in a way very few places do.
Coming from India, a culture that celebrates ornamentation and ceremonial beauty so instinctively, Paris offers me an important counterbalance. It reminds me that elegance often lies in restraint. In understanding the poetry of what is left unsaid.
These journeys have influenced far more than my collections. They have shaped the way I see the world itself
Some of my most inspiring moments there have had little to do with fashion itself. They have come instead from wandering through museums on rainy afternoons, sitting at cafés observing the rhythm of the city, or losing myself inside antique markets and hidden vintage stores. I have always been drawn to objects that carry history within them—old books, carpets, paintings, tarnished silver, forgotten frames, vintage textiles, fragments of decorative art. They remind you of a world where beauty was created slowly, intimately, and with the intention to endure.
Milan affects me differently. If Paris is poetry, Milan is discipline.
Italy possesses an extraordinary relationship with craftsmanship. Whether in fashion, furniture, architecture, or cuisine, there exists a reverence for detail that borders almost on obsession. Milan taught me that luxury is not merely embellishment; it is equally construction, precision, finish, and integrity and that both excess and restraint have their respective roles to play in the world.
Over the years, I have spent countless seasons visiting Milan during design weeks, and what continues to fascinate me is how seamlessly creativity coexists alongside functionality there. Design is not treated as something separate from life; it breathes within everyday living itself. As someone increasingly drawn to the broader world of luxury living and interiors, Milan continues to influence how I think about creating complete aesthetic worlds rather than isolated garments.
And then there’s Istanbul, perhaps the city that stirs me most deeply of all.
Istanbul feels almost mythical in parts, as though one is walking through the memory of an empire rather than a modern city. Resting between two continents, it carries within it centuries of conquest, spirituality, trade, and artistic exchange. Europe and Asia do not merely meet there; they seem to breathe together.
For someone whose collections have often drawn inspiration from the Ottoman and Safavid worlds, Istanbul remains endlessly evocative. The domes, minarets, palaces, spice markets, mosaics, calligraphy, and layered textures create a visual richness that feels cinematic in the truest sense. There is grandeur there, certainly, but also melancholy. Beauty in Istanbul is never pristine; it is weathered gently by time, and perhaps that is precisely what makes it unforgettable.
When I look back today, I realise these journeys have influenced far more than my collections. They have shaped the way I see the world itself. Travel has taught me that style is deeply connected to memory and identity, that beauty is often a civilisation’s way of preserving its soul against the passage of time.
Perhaps that is why I continue to indulge in these mystical journeys so relentlessly and joyfully. Not merely to discover new places, but to collect fragments of emotion, history, and culture that eventually find their way into my work, my photographs, and indeed, my life itself.
I feel deeply privileged to experience these extraordinary worlds of beauty, history, and wonder—and even more so to reinterpret and reimagine them through a visual language that has become distinctly my own, while remaining, with immense gratitude, indebted to the glorious past that continues to inspire and surround me.
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