Raw Mango’s London Fashion Week debut is a celebration of traditional textiles

On the first floor of design brand Raw Mango’s headquarters in Gurugram is a glass-walled room filled with garlands. Dozens of them hang on four clothing racks. Touch them and you realise they are not real.

“These are handmade but you can’t tell, can you?” says designer Sanjay Garg, who founded the brand in 2008, explaining how embroideries were used to shape silk to resemble flowers.

In less than two weeks, these garlands of jasmine and lotus—fastened on to shirts, dresses, trousers, jackets, blouses, coats and saris—will appear on the runway at Lindley Hall as part of the London Fashion Week. This fall-winter 2026 collection will mark the international debut of Raw Mango, known for its silk saris and handwoven textiles.

Garg has no immediate plans of entering the London market but sees the show as a way to “gauge” the demand. Raw Mango has six stores across India, with a new one coming up soon in Ahmedabad.

“Flowers are important in South-East Asia and South Asia, but we don’t really have a culture of giving one individual flower to someone, like, say, a rose on Valentine’s Day. People do give but as a culture, we are a country of garlands. Whether it’s a death, a birth, a wedding or a religious ritual, you see garlands irrespective of the religion,” says Garg, who did a collection in 2024 called Garland. “I want to show through my (fall-winter 2026) collection how a 3D garland becomes the body rather than just a decoration. It’s not about one individual flower, it’s about the plurality.”

Fashion, in general, tends to favour the singular bloom. For Chanel, the camellia—rendered as brooch, buttonhole, earring or embroidered motif—is an eternal house code. Dior has its lily of the valley; Givenchy, red carnations; Rohit Bal, the red rose. The flower in high fashion is often distilled into an emblem—recognisable, repeatable, proprietary.

Garg’s garland disrupts that logic. The other idea he seems to want to challenge in London on 23 February is the assumption that Indian fashion is full of heavy, glittering embellishment. That intent comes through in the 40-odd garments made from a variety of silks, wools and satins.

A fabric gajra or garland placed with precision transforms an otherwise plain silk shirt into a collector’s item. A blouse rendered in such intricate brocade that it appears almost 3D-printed leaves you marvelling at the skill of the artisans behind it. Long coats carry embroidered garlands that look less like decoration and more like strands of jewellery. In one look, the entire garland becomes the silhouette for a dress. Each garment is simple enough to fit your daily wardrobe but complex enough to be a conversation starter. The effect is not minimalism but a reflection of restraint, a sensibility slowly gaining ground in fashion, including couture.

“Whenever a designer from here showcases abroad, the conversation emphasises the number of hours—‘this dress took 8,000 man-hours’, ‘that one took 900 hours’,” Garg says. “We focus so much on embroidery that it seems India is merely an embroidery-producing country. Do international brands talk about the number of hours they spent on a dress? It’s not about working hours, it’s about how good the design is. A good design can also be simple. The world thinks India means embroidery and OTT dressing. I want to break these stereotypes. After farming, textiles is one of India’s largest sectors. I want to showcase what we have to offer beyond embroidery.”

What the collection noticeably lacks are the riotous colours Raw Mango has become known for. There is no signature phalsa (wild blueberry), sharbati (a blend of orange and hot pink), rani (Indian fuchsia), anandi (a muted blue) or haldi (turmeric). Instead, Garg works with a restrained palette of whites, golds and blacks, punctuated by parrot green and lime, his signature.

Was the shift intentional, especially given the international market’s preference for subtler tones? “If I used that green on a garland, it would start looking like plastic grass,” he says by way of explanation.

How the international market receives the fall-winter collection will become clear soon. By narrowing his palette and keeping his focus on textiles rather than embellishments, Garg is making a pointed argument: that Indian fashion doesn’t always have to rely on spectacle to assert itself. India’s textiles are loud enough on their own.