Raw Mango At London Fashion Week: When A Garland Crosses Continents

London has seen Indian fashion before — embroidered lehengas, gilded surfaces, spectacle calibrated for global runways. What it hasn’t seen, at least in this way, is Sanjay Garg sending out a meditation on the garland.

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As Raw Mango approaches its 18th year, Garg is taking the brand to London Fashion Week on February 23rd, without altering its vocabulary to suit the postcode. “Presenting in London is as good as presenting in Kanpur, for me,” he says. “At the end of the day, it is the work being presented that matters. And that doesn’t change according to who is viewing it, or where.”

That perspective shapes the collection titled ‘It’s Not About the Flower.’ The name carries a quiet provocation. In cultures across South and Southeast Asia, a single flower rarely carries the emotional weight that a string of them does. “We don’t really have a culture of giving one individual flower to someone,” Garg says. “We are a country of garlands.” Meaning is gathered through repetition. Significance comes from plurality.

There is something striking about choosing a garland as the central form. A garland — the everyday string of marigold, jasmine, tuberose, mogra, etc., that marks births, weddings, temple rituals, political rallies, and framed portraits in living rooms. It moves between celebration and grief with ease. It is handled, hung, replaced, and remade. Familiar to the point of invisibility.

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Garg shifts that familiarity onto the body.

“I wanted to show how a 3D garland becomes the body rather than just a decoration,” he explains. The floral forms do not sit passively at the neckline. They arc across torsos, wrap around shoulders, and interrupt silhouettes. The reference travels across time — from ancient stone sculptures where carved garlands drape across chests to the bundled potlis in flower markets across the subcontinent.

The flowers in this collection are constructed with precision. Jasmine-like shapes are laser-cut from silk and assembled by hand. Rajnigandhas are rolled from silk with a paper-like finish. Each bloom is placed and embroidered manually before becoming part of a larger formation.

The embroidery remains light. Garg is clear about why. “Indian fashion is too often quantified — it's not seen for its innate aesthetic value, but the number of hours it took a weaver to create a garment,” he says. The fixation on density and dazzle has shaped global expectations. Heavy gold thread, maximal surfaces, visual overload. “It’s a surface-level engagement that sometimes drowns out the beauty of the weave itself.”

This collection moves away from that gaze. The weave holds space. Construction becomes visible. Form carries as much weight as embellishment.

Some looks push into sculptural territory, built with padding and welded iron rings — a language Raw Mango explored earlier in ‘Children of the Night.’ Others stay closer to familiar silhouettes, allowing the garland motif to define the garment in ways that feel immediate and wearable. “Our focus was presenting interpretations of how the garland sits on the body,” Garg says. The outcome ranges from structured pieces that hold their own architecture to softer drapes that invite movement.

“This collection heavily features black and white,” he says — a departure from what international audiences often anticipate from an Indian label. Instead of saturated colour fields, Garg works with contrast. Into this monochrome base arrive flashes of green, lemon yellow and pink — hues drawn from the flower markets themselves. He calls them “visual sorbets,” small bursts that shift the rhythm of a look without overwhelming it.

Placed on a London runway, these choices resist the shorthand often applied to Indian design. Garg does not feel the need to amplify or dilute for a global stage. “Our work has received a lot of positive attention from this part of the world,” he says, referencing ambassadors, first ladies, artists, and diplomats who have worn Raw Mango. “Add to that, our 18th anniversary is on the horizon, and London is a place I’ve always felt a deep connection to. That said, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong time to have a show. It’s just happening now.”

When asked what he hopes audiences take away, Garg widens the lens. “India is a vast land filled to the brim with stories,” he says. “Each culture, each tradition, language, tribe, religion, and state has so many stories to tell… a chaotic repository that is difficult to organise and document.” That complexity finds expression through textiles, through form, and through colour. “Indian brands are simply reflecting the diversity of voices, which means there is something for everyone, no matter where they are on the globe.”

Since 2008, Raw Mango has built a following among women who care deeply about design and material. Over time, that audience has expanded across age groups and geographies. For Garg, London is another location in an ongoing conversation. “I’m less interested in defining my audience and more interested in further exploring and articulating my design language that can cater to different audiences that transcends borders and seasons,” he says.

In this chapter, that language speaks through a garland — multiplied, reconstructed, stretched across black and white, and edged with citrus and rose. An object that has moved across thresholds for centuries now steps onto a runway thousands of miles away.

The flower remains part of a string. The string becomes a form. And the form travels.

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Garland: Raw Mango Weaves Stories Of Love And Identity In Its Festive Collection 2024