H&M’s latest designer collaboration with Indian designer Anamika Khanna, announced on Thursday, comes at a special time.
Marking 20 years since the first designer collaboration — with Karl Lagerfeld in 2004 — the unusual strategy has broken boundaries through the years, and resulted in projects with Alexander Wang, Diane von Furstenberg, Stella McCartney and more. This is H&M’s second collaboration with an Indian designer, following Sabyasachi Mukherjee in 2021. Like Sabyasachi, Anamika Khanna is based out of Kolkata.
She launched her brand in 1998, and is known as one of the top designers in the country. The project comes as H&M closes in on a decade in India, after launching there in 2015. Today, H&M operates about 62 stores in the country in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.
The Anamika Khanna collaboration will launch Sept. 5 in select countries, including in 20 stores in India, as well as the U.K., South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, with an aim to bring Indian design into those markets.
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While Khanna is often associated with high glamour wedding-wear, her H&M collection brings glamour, but “reimagining it with comfort, and a fresh look at traditional cuts such as kurta pajamas, caftans and lungi skirts,” she told WWD in an exclusive interview. “It starts off with a sense of glamour, even in its loungewear. It’s very easy, very relaxed and also at the same time, versatile enough for either daywear or eveningwear — it’s your personal take on it. Its lounge, but the boundaries are blurred,” she said.
Ann-Sofie Johansson, head of design for H&M, told WWD that Khanna was a “master of contrasts, mixing feminine and masculine codes to create something entirely new.” It took 15 months to develop.
“It’s a different approach to fashion. The relaxation, the versatility, the different ways to style it up or down if you want to and a little bit of subtle sportiness in it,” she added. “When we choose a designer, we only go with someone we admire, that’s the first thing … It has to be someone we connect with and of course somebody who we think our customers will appreciate. Then we start our collaboration it comes in with the pricing, the size, the balancing.”
“It’s a bit of fashion frenzy, and a fear-of-missing-out thing when you do a collaboration, whether it is global or local, is that everyone is looking for something special, to have something that is unique and a limited collection so there is always kind of an urgency and a rush,” she said.
Translating design to more affordable retail can be challenging, but both Khanna and Johansson emphasized the importance of “the edit” in bringing in the right factors, and making both sides understand each other.
“It wasn’t that difficult,” Khanna observed. “It meant a lot of thoughtful planning; it was meticulous and needed to be given enough time and love to translate it, to get the parameters in place. It’s just the journey of it, the effort and time it takes. You have to know how to edit, to put the key factors in place — for example sustainability, and practicality, or the price, the silhouettes and how they work for each country.”
The collection, which features womenswear, menswear and accessories, has prints and embroidery, and easy silhouettes, several with an emphasis on the midriff, which Khanna described as a “part of Indian heritage with the sari.”
“The open midriff being adopted by the rest of the world is great — we saw it being taken internationally and now it’s come back,” she said.
“Honestly, I feel blurring of boundaries is a trend. I don’t see a single person who just wants to wear one particular style set out for them. Everyone wants to make their own style and make a statement. People are now going with what sets them apart; they’re looking for timelessness, and a lot of international fashion is being incorporated in India,” she said.
The availability of fast-growing fashion retail in India has been spurring the transformation as well, with both local brands and department store chains like Shoppers Stop, Central, and Reliance Trends, and global brands like Zara and H&M, that have been setting the pace. “The potential size of the market speaks for itself, which is upwards of 100 million people,” said Amit Kothari, head customer activation and marketing, H&M India. “The fact that people like what we’re offering keeps us motivated, and there’s a growing adaption of fashion awareness at large. We believe very strongly that India has so much to offer.”
Asked if India was influencing design for H&M, Johansson, who has returned to India after 20 years, replied quickly: “Not just for H&M, but for the world; for the fashion industry itself, which is looking for something new, and that hasn’t been seen in the same sense. It’s all in the mix.” She said that inspiration from different parts of the world and curiosity were driving fashion, along with the “need to stay relevant, to evolve and develop.”
“You can’t lean back, you can’t be too comfortable, you have to push yourself all the time — whether you are an independent designer like Anamika or a bigger brand like H&M. You always have to be striding ahead and that is what is so interesting in fashion,” she said.
Perhaps the idea of collaborations does just that.
Earlier this year, H&M launched a designer collaboration with Rok Hwang, who Johansson described as being at the “forefront of a new wave of Korean designers” with his London based brand, Rokh.
“We constantly ask ourselves, are we going to continue? Everyone’s doing collaborations today, it’s nothing new, unlike when we first started. But then you know there are so many creative and passionate designers,” she said, clearly enjoying the process.
