Niki Mahajan

A recipient of Yuv Rattan Award, Indian fashion designer Niki Mahajan has carved a niche in the fashion industry with her design aesthetic and use of homegrown textiles. Bringing out the humble weavers' and artisans' capabilities and helping them achieve a better quality of life, the fashion designer is always figuring way to empower the huge talent reserve of India, globally.

A recipient of Yuv Rattan Award in 2013 for excellence in promoting the production of unique fabrics, by the Ministry of Textiles, Government of India, textile and fashion designer Niki Mahajan has carved a niche in the fashion industry with her design aesthetic and use of homegrown textiles. Bringing out the humble weavers' and artisans' capabilities and helping them achieve a better quality of life, she is always figuring way to empower the huge talent reserve of India, globally.

Niki Mahajan has an interesting design history. She launched her eponymous luxury label in 1988. Since, she developed a niche for her label worldwide owing to her unique design aesthetic of contemporary silhouettes crafted using homegrown textiles and heritage textile craft. She is also a director of the Fashion Design Council of India- the country's apex fashion body.

"When I started some 25 years back, I used to do bridal wear and, along the way, I was experimenting with craft too. Also, I started taking my craft to the international market; so that's how I turned away from couture and started working with a whole lot of international buyers" she tells Business Standard. "They do not buy Indian wear and so that's how the transition happened. We got so busy with the international market and the label caught up so well that I didn't get the time to do bridal and couture wear." Now she is back designing haute couture and bridal wear much to the delight of her loyal clientele. 

Niki Mahajan is credited with the renaissance of badla work. “In the days of the Nawabs, the royal family would differentiate their costumes from the common man by using badla (wire) that had been cut from beaten sheets of gold and silver. The wire is inserted into the fabric and then beaten with a hammer into different shapes" Mahajan tells Vogue. "But when I visited Lucknow, there were only 20 families still practising this form of embroidery since it’s very time-consuming and doesn’t have many takers now." Since, the designer invited the artisans to her factory where they spent two months researching and inventing new techniques which would make the hand embroidery more wearer-friendly and pretty soon badla work graced her couture collections.

“Taking inspiration from hand woven fabrics, embroidery and wooden blocks we aspire to create a modern look for the world. India, Japan, Europe, Middle East, USA" she tells FDCI. Niki Mahajan has been working in the Indian fashion industry to uphold the works of talented artisans from the states of Bihar, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Assam and the other remote areas of the country. She is particularly upholded for creating a new fabric called "Reeds", made by splitting grass and treating it with natural elements. Working alongside people who have received national acclaim from their own states, Niki Mahajan has been lucky to learn the art of making fabrics from the grass root level.

An amalgamation of a number of near- languishing hand crafted textile techniques, combined artistically and reinvented to appeal to cultures across the globe.

Craft revivalist, textile conservationist and fashion designer Niki Mahajan has built her career on reviving indigenous textiles in a modern global context and giving weaver clusters and artisans across the country a fresh lease of life. She continues to work with them at grassroots level when researching weaves, identifying weavers of languishing weaves and training artisans of languishing heritage textile crafts at workshops in her factory. This gives shape to her vision of crafting contemporary womenswear using homegrown textiles and heritage textile craft. 

Niki Mahajan retails haute couture, bridal couture and western wear with a modern aesthetic, handcrafted with indigenous textiles and textile techniques. Her couture showing in 2013 was a milestone. Per Explosive Fashion: "The industry's great and good gathered to see Niki Mahajan Couture inspired by late Begum Hazrat Mahal… The show had emotional and intellectual resonance, something the designer had explained: "We have woven a collection of handcrafted keepsakes using two hundred techniques of handwork. These looks are an amalgamation of exotic embroideries and delicate woven silk.""