Cord's argument is one sentence long: craft decides the garment, not the other way round. In Modinagar, Uttar Pradesh, the hands that hand-smock Cord's cotton gather the Chloe Dress at the neck and shoulders into a structured yoke, lace set into the shoulder seams, elasticated cuffs holding the sleeve close while the skirt below is left to move on its own.
Neha Singh and Pranav Guglani met at Pearl Academy during a postgraduate course in fashion marketing, and founded Cord together in 2015, as partners in the business and, eventually, in life. The beginning was unpolished on purpose. "It wasn't polished; it was very DIY, but that was part of the fun," Singh has said of those first months. Guglani puts the working relationship plainly: "We immediately felt like we could work together, and we shared similar ideas, values, and dreams." A decade on, Cord runs stores across Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad, with stockists at Ogaan and Ensemble, and marked its tenth year with a new concept store in Delhi. Cord belongs to Heritage Labs, the Movement where hand-craft is the substrate of the garment rather than a finishing touch.
Smocking Is the Architecture, Not the Ornament
Smocking began as workwear, centuries before it became decoration: English field hands gathered fabric at the chest and sleeves so a garment could move with the body, and the honeycomb stitch that held those pleats in place was a structural answer before it was ever a pretty one. Cord's Modinagar artisans work from that same logic, not the decorative version it later became. The gathering shapes the piece; embroidery and print land on top of it, not the other way round.
In the ivory tunic from Cord's Hiraeth line, hand-smocking and gathers share the surface with a dahlia block print: a smocked yoke doing structural work at the shoulders while the print handles the rest of the body, neither flattening into background for the other. It's the same logic as the Chloe Dress, applied to a different silhouette entirely: gather first, decorate second, and let the two argue for space on the same cloth.
Craft decides the garment. Everything else follows.
The Fabric Does the Structural Work
Cord's own accounting puts seventy-five percent of its fabric at handwoven organic cotton and linen, sourced from South India and Bhagalpur rather than a mill. Handwoven cloth carries an irregularity mill cotton doesn't: the weave catches light unevenly, the surface holds a texture a machine can't flatten out, and once it's gathered into smocking the result has a dimensionality manufactured cloth can't fake, however precisely the pleats are counted.
Cord's own accounting puts seventy-five percent of its fabric at handwoven organic cotton and linen, sourced from South India and Bhagalpur rather than a mill.
"India's incredible resources — block printing, craftsmanship, smocking — are the foundation of what we do." (Neha Singh, Homegrown)
That foundation runs under everything Cord makes, including the leather. The label's first product, sampled in December 2014 and taken to an official launch on February 7, 2015, wasn't cloth at all: it was a hand-stitched leather bag, the Hemicycle, that gave Cord its first real traction before the smocking line existed, catching the attention of a few celebrities early on. The leather never left the catalogue even after cloth took over the label's identity. The construction logic carried over: things made slowly, by the same hands, over years, hold a quality that speed can't reach.
Each Collection Starts From a Feeling
Each Cord collection starts from a specific memory rather than a trend. Album 91, the Spring/Summer '26 collection, works from the feeling of a childhood family holiday in India: the scenery going past a train window, the hotel balcony shared with people you love, the games that filled a train compartment with noise. It runs across linen, cotton, cotton satin, cotton silk, cambric, and slub cotton, and the palette (pink, yellow, green, blue) pulls from summer markets and marigold garlands rather than a mood board built from someone else's references. Hand embroidery, appliqué, smocking, and patchwork carry the same handwork logic as the rest of the label, turned toward a brighter register.
Daydreamers, the label's Winter '25–26 collection, and Daily Hymns, an earlier collection built around the ordinary textures of daily ritual, run on the same construction (hand-smocked, handwoven-first, artisan-made), pointed at a different mood each time. The collections that came before carry names of their own too: The Muse, Cord Man, The Odyssey, each one cycling the label's small vocabulary of techniques toward a different feeling, across a decade. The technique doesn't change. What changes is the memory the label decided to design from.
The Store Is Built Like a Train Carriage
Cord's tenth-anniversary concept store in Delhi is not a showroom bolted onto the collections; it's the same argument built in three dimensions. The interiors run vintage and art deco, laid out to resemble an old train carriage (a direct echo of the train-window memory that runs through Album 91), with small homegrown brands sitting alongside Cord's own collections rather than being crowded out by them. "Our new concept store is a reflection of everything that has inspired us (art, travel, and a sense of wanderlust)," Guglani and Singh have said of it. "The idea was always to create a space where people could come in and truly experience the brand, through light, space, fabric, and design," Guglani has added.
"Our customers have become co-creators of the Cord language. How they wear our pieces, how they style them — it's an ongoing conversation…" (Neha Singh)
A decade of the same Modinagar hands, the same conviction that craft should determine the garment rather than sit on top of it: that's the whole argument, repeated in cotton, linen, and leather, season after season. NEW////COMMON is the room these clothes belong in.
Cord sits in Heritage Labs, one of the five Movements on NEW////COMMON. If it holds you, read Deeta and MARGN.
Find Cord on new-common.com.
