The Court Does Not Need Permission

When Indian luxury stops translating itself

There is a fabric that no longer exists. It was called baft-hawa, or woven air, and it came exclusively from the banks of the Meghna River in Bengal, woven from a species of cotton called phuti karpas whose fibers were so fine they could only be spun during the early morning dew, before the threads dried and snapped. Mughal courtiers had it made into garments so transparent that attendants were reprimanded for appearing unclothed, only for their accusers to discover they were draped in several layers. European travelers wrote about it with the vocabulary reserved for the inexplicable. Thread counts between 800 and 1,200 — on pit looms made of bamboo and rope. With the full weight of modern textile technology, thread counts above 500 are considered exceptional.

The British East India Company understood what it was looking at. By the mid-eighteenth century, Bengal's textile exports were worth approximately 16 million rupees annually. Between 1800 and 1860 — through price-fixing, crippling taxes on Indian weavers, tariff structures that locked Indian cloth out of European markets while flooding Indian ones with Lancashire mill goods — textile exports from India fell by 98 percent. Imports from Britain surged by over 6,300 percent. Design historian Sonia Ashmore, author of Muslin, has described it plainly: "The trade was built up and destroyed by the British East India Company. They really put a stranglehold on its production and came to control the whole trade." India, which had produced 25 percent of the world's textiles in the seventeenth century, was producing 2 percent by 1900.

The techniques died with the weavers who carried them, and what replaced them — in the global imagination of Indian fashion — was color, embellishment, and occasion. The subcontinent as exuberance. The subcontinent as the opposite of quiet. The colonial project not only destroyed a textile industry. It rewrote what Indian cloth was understood to be.

Quiet luxury, as the West has recently named and claimed it, was not invented in a Milanese atelier or a New York design studio. It was the operating principle of subcontinental courts for centuries — the idea that restraint signals power, that the most expensive cloth in the room is the one that appears to be nothing until someone who knows holds it up to the light. The Nizam of Hyderabad. The Mughal emperor in layers of muslin invisible against the air. The brocades of Varanasi, the Chanderi weaves of Madhya Pradesh, the Jamdani that survived when everything around it was extinguished — these were not craft traditions. They were a material vocabulary of authority. The West extracted the logic, stripped the provenance, and repackaged it as European sophistication, while the subcontinent was left holding the stereotype it had been handed.

Jo Hukm is India saying that the court does not need permission from another court. The luxury credential is in the people and the process, and the price is justified by what the cloth is and what was done to it.

ITOH and the Restraint That Is Not Empty

Like Akbar's court of old, India has some real gems in the making. People who are carrying forward traditions long thought lost. Take, for example, Amit Babbar's ITOH. Amit spent fifteen years inside Japanese fashion — Maison de Soil, Tsumori Chisato, ne Quittez pas — before returning to New Delhi to build something that carried both traditions without explaining either. The fabrics are exclusively handwoven for the brand by weavers in West Bengal using matha tant, the hand-operated pit loom. Cotton, cotton-silk, linen, washed wool, ramie — each material is chosen because the weave produces a quality and texture that no mill can replicate. Fourteen capsule collections, each called a Lot, are stocked at luxury menswear boutiques in Japan. Babbar's own words on what ITOH is: "We want to make for people who are fashion-conscious. We have clean, modern, very restrained ways of doing things."

Like Akbar's court of old, India has some real gems in the making.

The restraint is not a design position. It is what happens when someone who has spent fifteen years understanding how Japanese luxury menswear works applies that understanding to Indian handwoven cloth. The silhouette stays out of the way so the textile can do what it was made to do, and that is a different kind of confidence than embellishment. It is the confidence of knowing the clothes are enough.

MARGN and the Yarn at the Courtly Register

Sumiriddhi Bhattacharyya's MARGN works the argument from a different fiber entirely. Where ITOH builds Japanese-restraint silhouettes from West Bengal handweaves, MARGN builds them from hand-knitted and hand-crocheted yarn — the rural-craft equivalent of ITOH's restraint. The Collagen Overshirt, the Fibula Striped Handknit Trousers, the Vertebrae Symbolic Shirt. Every piece carries the slow time of a craftsperson's hands moving through yarn that wasn't spun on a machine. The vocabulary is anatomical, named after the body parts the garment is closest to, the way a tailor speaks of how cloth meets a wearer. MARGN's hero pieces — the more elaborate handknit trousers, the structured handknit overshirts — sit at couture credentials plus accessible-premium price plus rural-craft conviction. The three Jo Hukm gates in conversation rather than shouting.

HARAGO at the Hero Register

Similarly, Harsh Agarwal's HARAGO, launched in Jaipur in January 2019, created a design vocabulary from his grandmother's textile collection — vintage pieces that documented how Indian cloth once performed at its highest register, before the category was reorganized around occasion wear and export aesthetics. The techniques borrow from kalamkari hand-painting from Andhra Pradesh, kantha and sujni embroidery from Bengal, appliqué, patchwork, block printing, and beadwork — practices that the colonial period devalued as a support industry.

The Vintage Brocade Shirt is built from heirloom silk saree fabric with hand-finished gold zari trim — one-of-one, family-collection sourced. The Bead Embroidered Wool Jacket places hand-embroidered beadwork at credential level on refined wool, evening-tier. The Floral Kantha Blouson Jacket carries every stitch as a nod to the unique craftsmanship the brand articulates explicitly. The Daisy Applique Jacket sits at the catalog's hero register — couture-grade hand-construction over weeks, the price calibrated to what the work is.

Agarwal has spoken directly about the danger of Indian fashion being reduced to exportable Orientalism — the immediately recognizable aesthetic that confirms a Western expectation rather than challenging it. HARAGO's hero pieces exist precisely so the cloth and the technique cannot be dismissed as costume. The cloth is working at the price listed.

Perte de Go and the Diaspora Resort

Perte de Go is what happens when courtly couture conviction meets resort silhouette. The Santorini beaded dress, the Heritage Bloom Embroidered Shirt, and the Garden Party Embroidered Shirt operate at the same register as ITOH's matha tant — couture-grade hand-embroidery and hand-beadwork, price calibrated to what the work is worth, editorial restraint that signals the wearer doesn't need to translate themselves. The brand prices in USD because it's positioned for a global diaspora audience, but the Jo Hukm logic is identical: the cloth is the credential, the embroidery is at couture-grade execution, and the silhouette stays clean enough that the surface cannot be dismissed as costume. The Riveria Evening Shirt is what a wedding shirt looks like when the wedding is in a city built between Delhi and New York.

Oblum and the Wholecut Argument

Speaking of objects that speak to the work that made them, let's look at Oblum. The Falaknuma is a wool reinterpretation of the English Albert slipper, named after the palace that sits on the highest hill in Hyderabad. The Peshawari, in full-grain leather, features brogued edges and a napa leather lining. The Wholecut Oxford is cut from a single piece of leather with no seams across the vamp, one pair per size, treated as a limited edition rather than inventory. The Adelaide Oxford Spectator sits beside them as the hero-tier ready-to-wear anchor. Each piece is handcrafted by six karigars from Agra working out of the Oblum Townhouse in Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad, hand-welted by a founder who trained at Milan's ModaPella Academy and London College of Fashion's Cordwainers program and spent time at Crockett & Jones. The construction is precise because the making demands it.

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Indian shoemaking at this level of material and handwork has historically been invisible to the luxury market, or positioned as export-grade manufacturing for European labels rather than what the craft itself justifies. Oblum is pricing hand-welted Indian footwear at the intersection of leather and welting costs and the value of a precisely constructed, handcrafted shoe. The craft is the credential, and the price reflects it.

The Court

The question that luxury never answers is who defined quiet, and for whose room. The restraint that reads as luxury in a Western context — invisible logos, muted palette, expensive nothing — was legible as such because European craft had spent a century positioning itself as the benchmark after systematically dismantling the material traditions that predated it.

When ITOH places hand-woven matha tant cloth at Japanese luxury stockists, when MARGN places hand-knit yarn at couture conviction, when Perte de Go places hand-embroidered resort wear at a price that is calibrated rather than aspirational, when HARAGO prices a Vintage Brocade Shirt at what vintage handloom silk saree fabric with hand-finished gold zari trim is worth, when Oblum places a hand-welted Peshawari and a wool Falaknuma on the same shelf as an Oxford and a Derby — they are not entering someone else's conversation about luxury. They are reasserting the one that was interrupted.

The court does not need permission from another court.