“I want to wear what you are wearing,” is a line fashion designer Anamika Khanna gets to hear quite a lot from her clients. This time, however, it came from a friend and one of Khanna’s sources of inspiration—Mira Rajput Kapoor. As she launched a new spring-summer line under her ready-to-wear label, AK-OK, Kapoor couldn’t take her eyes off Khanna’s crisp white-collared shirt, which she paired with hippie-chic denim pants. This is one of the many pieces Kapoor took back home the night of the launch. What made the outfit special was the way Khanna captured the sartorial essence of Odisha’s Bonda tribe—its colours, motifs, and embroideries—integrating their distinct artistry into modern everyday clothing.
The collection was serendipitously conceived; the idea first struck over a leisurely cup of afternoon tea with a close friend, and soon snow-balled into an impulse to translate her thoughts onto paper. As her friend passionately narrated her adventurous journey through Odisha’s heartland on a bike, Khanna found herself absorbed in the stories of the untamed landscape and its people, who wore vibrant, self-woven jute clothes. Using this as the reference point, combined with her imagination, Khanna built a body of garments—jackets, slouchy pants, drapes and kaftans—predominantly in denim, with quintessential tribal motifs, in a palette comprising mostly whites, ivories and blacks.
