From Delhi To The World

Meet menswear designer Suket Dhir, a self-described former “slacker” who once sold mobile phones for AT&T and has now made himself into India’s rising fashion star.

- Guy Trebay

In a stifling office on the second floor of an anonymous building along a dusty lane in Lado Sarai – the new hub for young artists in a corner of the southwestern part of New Delhi – a 38-year-old menswear designer Vogue.com has called a “global fashion superstar in the making” sat in semidarkness.

The power had gone out. Somehow the power is always going out in 21st-century India, a nation with 1.25 billion people, thousands of years of recorded history and the capacity to deploy nuclear weaponry.

India is a paradoxical country. And Suket Dhir is a paradoxical guy. Born in Punjab, he is an unshorn and unshaven Punjabi Hindu who styles himself a “wannabe Sikh”; a self-described former “slacker” now blissfully married to a Russian-Indian woman, Svetlana Dhir, who manages the business; a creative talent eager to compete on the global stage, and yet one who shares his small studio office with his elderly father.

He is also an expert craftsman whose subtle tailoring was recognised last January with one of the most prestigious honours in fashion, the International Woolmark Prize, an award that has also gone to Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent.

The judges who selected Dhir as the latest recipient focused their praise on the romantic and internationalised vision of the designer, whose last foray outside India (before travelling to Florence, Italy, to collect the $75,000 in prize money) was a brief trip to Dubai two decades earlier.

Perhaps most appealing of Dhir’s contradictions is how his restrained tailoring honours and deftly makes use of a range of the varied craft traditions that remain among the wonders of India while simultaneously mining a design vocabulary partly formed by his habit of binge-watching Seinfeld.