When designer Payal Jain was brought in to design the uniforms for The Oberoi Rajgarh Palace in Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh, she wasn’t just asked to make the staff look the part. She had to figure out what people in the 350-year-old palace hotel could wear to work in the Bundelkhand heat that would also survive hundreds of washes while representing the property.
That is a very different brief from designing a fashion collection but Jain has been doing it for more than three decades. Hospitality has long been a separate vertical of her business, and she has designed for The Oberoi, Four Seasons and other hotels across the world.
At Rajgarh, she started with the palace itself: its arches, domes, sandstone walls and Bundelkhand history became references for patterns, prints and embroidery. Long tunics, layered jackets, kurtas and panelled skirts were worked in ivory, beige and muted gold, with details such as dome motifs and buttons bearing the Rajgarh seal. But the uniforms also had to work for the people wearing them. A couture garment can be designed around one body; a hotel uniform has to accommodate different heights, shapes and skin tones, withstand repeated laundering and allow for long hours of movement.
“Fashion is one end of the spectrum, and this is the other,” says Jain. “You constantly have to keep going back and telling yourself that this has to be functional, this has to work, and it has to last.”
That tension between fashion and function is becoming increasingly familiar as designers look beyond their labels. Hotels and restaurants are commissioning designers to create uniforms that fit into a property’s visual language, while brands are bringing them in to design everything from airline uniforms to merchandise and collectibles.
For Bengaluru-based designer Manoviraj Khosla, who has worked with brands like The Leela and the now defunct Kingfisher Airlines, the space itself is the starting point. He recently designed uniforms for several restaurants at The Leela Palace Bengaluru. At ZLB, a Japanese-inspired speakeasy, the interiors are dark, so Khosla used black and white, with red and black trims and two-tone shoes, creating a formal, almost tuxedo-like look that still allowed the staff to stand out. At The Azulian House, the brief changed again.
“The indoor-outdoor restaurant has a conservatory-like, botanical character, which found its way into floral embroidery on off-white denim skirts and waistcoats for women and safari-style shirts for men,” says Khosla, adding that the uniform must work with the space as well as reflect the character of the brand. That could mean bringing in a regional craft, as he did with kalamkari detailing for The Park, Visakhapatnam, or using denim and an asymmetric A-line jacket for the younger, more design-led Iconiqa hotel near Mumbai airport.
When couture enters the bar
For Mumbai-based designer Sandeep Gonsalves of Sarah & Sandeep, the evolution is visible in the briefs designers receive. “We look at the fabric, the cut, the detailing and the overall aesthetic,” Gonsalves says. The challenge is to make something practical while retaining enough design character for it to feel distinctive.
He has seen a change in uniforms over the years. Earlier, they tended to be formal and functional, with a person’s role immediately apparent from what they wore. Today, hotels and brands are more conscious of how every visual detail contributes to the brand identity, opening up possibilities for silhouettes, fabrics and colours, as well as the use of Indian craftsmanship in more contemporary ways.
Designer Pranav Kirti, who runs the ready-to-wear label HEUMN, recently collaborated with Delhi cocktail bar Sidecar on a limited-edition apron, created around its upcoming “Sidecar ke Kalakar” menu that treats workwear almost like a fashion object. Rather than a conventional apron, Kirti designed a hybrid silhouette somewhere between an overshirt and an apron in different weights of cotton, which can be layered and styled in different ways. Its unique detail is an image of Sidecar’s bartenders, created during a photoshoot at the bar and printed on the apron. “The people who are behind this artistry should be the face of this,” says Kirti. These pieces will be set aside for bartenders to use in house as well as during international travel for bar takeovers, with some eventually available for guests to buy through Sidecar.
For Kirti, the appeal is in creating something that has a life beyond straightforward merchandise. “It is also a style statement,” he says. “Right from the print to the construction, you can layer it, multiply it, you can style it.” He has previously worked on collaborations with brands like Pepsi, Lay’s and Absolut, and sees this kind of work as part of a larger shift towards collaborations across industries.
The idea extends to institutional and corporate dressing too. Manish Malhotra’s work for Air India in 2023 took his vocabulary of Indian dressing into uniforms for more than 10,000 employees. His ready-to-wear ombré saris, paired with blazers and optional trousers, were designed to align with Air India’s new visual identity. While the female cabin crew’s new uniform offered some flexibility in how it could be worn, it fell short of delivering the visual appeal one expects from a popular designer.
Jodhpur-based designer Raghavendra Rathore has similarly taken his signature sartorial vocabulary into institutional dressing. In 2023, he designed uniforms for the Border Security Force’s first women camel-mounted contingent for the Republic Day parade, combining bandhgalas and breeches with zardozi trims using the traditional danka technique and Mewar-inspired paghs. Rathore’s work across fashion, films and political dressing is another example of designers taking their design language beyond their own collections.
Jain says the movement works both ways. Her hospitality projects have taken her to places such as Laos, where the architecture and monasteries later became inspiration for a fashion collection. “They are not watertight compartments,” she explains of the two sides of her practice. “They flow one to the other.”
For designers, these projects offer a way to take their point of view beyond their own labels. A fashion collection is ultimately about the person who chooses to wear it; a uniform is part of an experience, seen repeatedly by everyone who walks through a hotel, restaurant or airport.
As Khosla puts it, “The most important person is the person you’re interacting with.” For a generation of designers increasingly looking beyond the runway and the retail floor, that interaction is becoming another canvas for their work.