Son of A Noble SNOB names its kurtas like a roll call at an English boarding school, on purpose. Maddox. Alfred. Theo. Felix. Nash. Colton. Elijah. Rory. Every one of them lands on an Indian kurta, from a menswear label that took the word "snob" and stripped it of its sting before handing it back as something worth wearing. The tension in that sentence is the tension the whole label runs on.
Mani Shanker Singh built Son of A Noble SNOB in Bangalore after fourteen years inside the corporate side of Indian fashion, as creative director at Myntra and at Madhura Garments, before he started designing kurtas that could hold the same rigour Western formalwear has always been given by default. The studio itself sits in HSR Layout, unglamorous coordinates for a label whose garments carry a boarding-school register. Ritu Jain co-founds the label alongside him and creative-directs its womenswear line. Every SNOB garment carries a small woven label that reads 286 T: his father's roll number at the Doon School, stitched onto every piece as a private credential nobody but the wearer needs to explain. Son of A Noble SNOB belongs to Heritage Labs, the Movement where hand-craft sits under the garment as its structure, not its finish.
The Fabric Does the Announcing
The construction earns its place before the story does. The Neco Kurta Set, in navy, is hand-embroidered in cut dana, sequin, and bead across a Tencel satin base, paired with a loose, drawstring pajama with side pockets: restraint that reads as intention rather than economy. The Maddox Farm Bandi, in pink, pairs a bandi over a kurta in a combination that lands as festive without performing festivity. The Colton Bricks Kurta, worked in olive, carries SNOB's signature caterpillar-stitch detail across 100% linen, turning a geometric print into structure rather than surface decoration. The Theo Kurta Set, in pink Chanderi silk with hand embroidery in beads and cutdana, sits its handwork close to the fabric instead of raised off it. The shirt line carries the same restraint into a simpler garment: Samuel in navy, Philip and Micah in off-white. The Dane, a hand-embroidered bandi in navy, extends the vocabulary into outerwear.
The 286 Is Not Decoration
The label sewn into every Son of A Noble SNOB piece isn't a size tag or a care instruction. It's Mani Shanker Singh's father's roll number from the Doon School, carried into a garment his father never wore: a private inheritance stitched where only the wearer will find it. It's a quiet reversal of what a designer label usually does: instead of announcing the house to the room, it hands the wearer a story that belongs to no one else. Ritu Jain, SNOB's co-founder and creative director, runs the womenswear side of the label on the same geometric, monochromatic language that defines the menswear: dresses, co-ord sets, shirts, jackets, and skirts built from the same handwork discipline.
A label nobody else will read, stitched where only the wearer finds it.
The References Are Wimbledon and Tetris, Not Just Tradition
Singh has said plainly that "clothes are not art, they need to be simple and functional," a rule that shows up in a design vocabulary that pulls from geometry, Wimbledon, postcards, and Tetris as readily as it pulls from menswear history. "Kurta is essentially a long shirt, I have given it a global approach," he has said, and the label's approach to gender is loose enough that the line runs gender-fluid rather than strictly split. He designs for what he calls the "new age man, who wants to experiment, but not go overboard," and has been direct about wanting the clothes to read young: "I wanted a 20-year-old to wear it." The palette he builds from stays disciplined: black, white, grey, green, and neutral tones, with linen doing most of the work and contemporary details like zips, tassels, and embroidery worked in against it rather than layered on top. That range shows up in the label's reach (SNOB has shown at Who's Next in Paris and stocked through Ounass in the Middle East) and, this year, in Bollywood: Singh dressed actor Akshaye Khanna in SNOB for scenes in the film Dhurandhar.
Singh has said plainly that "clothes are not art, they need to be simple and functional," a rule that shows up in a design vocabulary that pulls from geometry, Wimbledon, postcards, and Tetris as readily as it pulls from menswear history.
Contra Takes the Argument to a Runway
That same argument moved onto a runway this year. At FDCI India Men's Weekend 2026, staged at Diggi Palace in Jaipur, Son of A Noble SNOB showed Contra, a collection that blurs sport and grunge into the label's existing vocabulary. Camouflage and utility detailing, usually rigid by design, get pulled loose into fluid trousers, layered kurtas, and relaxed outerwear; military prints sit against jersey stripes; and for a label that has built its identity on graphics and print, embroidery arrived this season as something genuinely new. Coverage of the show described the effect precisely: discipline remained, but rigidity did not. What Contra keeps from military tailoring is the authority of the silhouette; what it drops is the requirement that authority be uncomfortable. The rigour holds. It just stopped standing at attention.
"We love to pick up basics and push ourselves to come up with something new and fresh." Mani Shanker Singh, t2online
Son of A Noble SNOB is not building for a single occasion, and it never claimed to be. The kurta has spent decades in the international wardrobe as occasion wear: the thing you put on because the event called for tradition. Singh is building a version that doesn't wait for an occasion, because it decided it is the occasion. The modern wardrobe doesn't hold one identity; it holds a library the wearer moves through depending on the room and the version of themselves walking into it. NEW////COMMON is where that library lives: 286 T stitched into every kurta, a roll call of names attached to a tradition that never asked permission to be current, whether anyone else ever reads it or not.
Son of A Noble SNOB sits in Heritage Labs, one of the five Movements on NEW////COMMON. If it holds you, read Deeta and Saphed.
Find Son of A Noble SNOB on new-common.com.
