ELLE Exclusive: With ARCANUM, Amit Aggarwal Codes Couture With Emotion And Evolution At India Couture Week In Association With FDCI

At India Couture Week 2025 in association with FDCI, Amit Aggarwal is set to present a living archive of memory, biology, and emotion. 

Titled ARCANUM, the collection charts a striking inward journey through the invisible terrain of human DNA. In classic Aggarwal style, it combines intricate detailing and silhouettes with a deep, sensorial encounter with identity and transformation.

Structured like a sacred procession, ARCANUM unfolds in five chapters—Origin, Bloom, Pulse, Mutation, and Memory—each a metaphorical exploration of the phases of existence. Cocoon-like forms give way to architectural blooms and fluid silhouettes; crystalline veins ripple like kinetic signals; ikat reappears not just as heritage but as encoded emotion.

"ARCANUM isn’t just about garments; it is a meditation on identity, essence, and transformation,” says Aggarwal. “DNA is the most intimate archive of existence. It holds not only our biology but also a spiritual and emotional resonance.”

Here, the double helix becomes muse and medium, a silent code that carries generations within its spiral. Each pleat and curve in the garment echoes this ancestral memory, translating the language of molecules into sculptural forms.

Where Couture Meets The Cellular

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This idea of design as living matter—shaped by memory, energy, and instinct—is foundational to ARCANUM. “When I began shaping the collection,” he shares, “I was deeply inspired by the language of the body: the way cells divide, how organisms evolve, how energy flows beneath the skin. Each garment became almost like a living organism.”

Across the showcase, one witnesses a tension that feels strikingly familiar: symmetry and mutation, control and chaos, inheritance and change. “Life doesn’t unfold in a straight line. It evolves through a delicate push and pull between order and unpredictability,” he explains. “I allowed elements of chaos to enter the frame, through asymmetry, unexpected material combinations, and silhouettes that seemed to morph as the wearer moved.”

This embrace of beautiful imperfection feels like a conscious resistance to fashion’s obsession with polish. Aggarwal invites the audience instead to think of couture as a mirror to life, composed, yet evolving.

The Fabric Is The Message

Materials in ARCANUM are more than tools; they’re metaphors. Handwoven nylon and polymer reflect the pulse of modernity, while organic cotton and ikat ground the collection in memory and tradition. “Each material was chosen not just for its physical properties, but for the story it could tell,” says Aggarwal. “Ikat, especially, became a dialogue between what is inherited and what is invented.”

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In the final act of the collection, Memory, Ikat re-emerges, transformed. “Cultural memory, for me, is the soul of modern couture. In the final act of ARCANUM, memory—ikat becomes a vessel for that idea. Ikat is not just a textile,” he explains. “It’s a living, breathing language of craft. DNA stores the imprints of generations, and in the same way, cultural memory encodes the creative lineage we carry forward.”

Couture And Emotion

There’s something spiritual about Aggarwal’s work, an emotional gravity that makes his pieces feel not just worn, but inhabited. He doesn’t shy away from acknowledging this. “That emotional undercurrent is everything to me. With ARCANUM, I want each piece to evoke something primal, felt in the body, in the memory.”

If he had to distil the collection into one word, he says it would be essence. “Because at its core, DNA is the very essence of life, an invisible code that carries the fundamental blueprint of who we are.”