Indian Designer Fashion Brands Embrace Immersive Flagship Stores

“A multi-designer store can introduce you to a product. A flagship has the ability to introduce you to the thinking, the culture and the complete world behind it,” says Amit Aggarwal, a renowned fashion designer. For Aggarwal, the flagship offers something neither online nor multi-designer retail can. His store brings couture, occasionwear, menswear, accessories and pret line AM.IT together for the first time.

NEW DELHI: Walk into Amit Aggarwal’s new flagship store in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda and it’s not the clothes you notice first. The 6,000 sq ft, two-level store sits inside a windowless heritage structure with exposed girders, split levels and irregular geometry. Inside, concrete, sculptural forms and shadows lead to a 13-foot suspended pod. For the designer, the idea was for the space to communicate “the world of Amit Aggarwal before you encountered the clothes.”

The store, which opened October 1, is part of a larger physical retail moment in Indian designer fashion. Aneeth Arora’s Péro opened its first retail store in India after 17.

For Aggarwal, the flagship offers something neither online nor multi-designer retail can. His store brings couture, occasionwear, menswear, accessories and pret line AM.IT together for the first time. “A multi-designer store can introduce you to a product. A flagship has the ability to introduce you to the thinking, the culture and the complete world behind it,” he says. Designers are making sure these worlds are memorable. Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla’s Mubarak Baug, which opened in August inside Mumbai’s Framjee Cawasjee Institute, sprawls across 20,000 sq ft. Designed by their art and design venture A Wonder Room, the fashion flagship is an homage to 40 years of the Indian maximalists. Inside there’s architecture, art, craft, couture and storytelling through murals, sculptures, installations and archival textiles.

At 11.11/eleven eleven’s Delhi flagship, Basement, a brass vat filled with indigo invites visitors to dip a piece of kora textile into its foamy blue pool.

Studio Medium’s Delhi flagship, meanwhile, incorporates textile installations. Arora’s Pérodise, in Delhi’s Lodhi Colony Market, has 1,500 sq ft of covered space and another 2,500 sq ft outdoors. She had waited until Péro found the right place — somewhere, as she puts it, “Péro will be happy to be.”

The space could well be the brand’s calling card. There are terracotta tiles made by potters from Odisha, hand-laid terrazzo, blown-glass hearts, beaten brass, copper bells from Gujarat’s Kutch region and handmade hangers. Clothing rails can disappear entirely, allowing it to become a gallery, host an artist or hold an intimate fashion show.

There’s something personal behind its openness too. As a design student in Mumbai, Arora remembers visiting designer stores for research and finding them intimidating. “We would feel people are scanning us from top to toe,” she says, with the implicit message: “You’re not going to be shopping here, so why are you here?” Pérodise is the opposite — people are welcome even without a sale.

That shift is changing the architect’s brief. “Brands now want more than a beautiful store. They want an interior that carries their design ideology,” says Vami Koticha, partner at sP+a, who has worked on Ritu Kumar Couture in Hyderabad and AK-OK at Palladium, Mumbai. “An traditional boutique presents product, while the new flagship presents an idea.”

At Ritu Kumar, a 3D-printed concrete wall mixes an old building material with robotic technology, echoing the brand’s reinvention of craft. At AK-OK, an aluminium skin across the walls and ceiling allows displays to keep changing.

Koticha’s test is simple: “You could take the clothes away and still know who the brand is.”

Abhay Gupta, founder and chairman of Luxury Connect in Gurugram, says, “India’s luxury market is maturing and the economics of a flagship now extend far beyond what is sold within its four walls.” A flagship is now a strategic brand asset, he says. For designers aspiring to build a luxury brand, it gives control over everything from storytelling and discovery to service and conversion. Done well, it can improve full-price selling and cross-category purchases, strengthen client relationships and ultimately increase pricing power and brand equity.

“A permanent physical address signals scale and permanence,” Gupta says.

The reason for retail’s return may also be more elemental. Arora is of the view that clothes need to be touched and felt. “In this day and age, when everyone is talking about online and AI, we are also realising that fashion is tactile, clothing is tactile,” she says. “Certain things are going to stay like these retail experiences.”

Aggarwal says the flagship makes sense for designers: “While digital introduces you to the world of a brand, a flagship allows you to step inside it.”