India Fashion Weeks

Welcome to the India Fashion Week Guide. In this section, the fashion week events that take place in India are listed: Delhi Fashion Week, India Fashion Week, Lakme Fashion Week and the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week, each linked above with its own full record in this directory.

A fashion week is a fashion industry event, lasting approximately one week, which allows fashion designers or fashion houses to display their latest collections. The collections are displayed via runway shows for buyers and the international fashion community to take a look at the latest trends — and India's weeks apply that format to one of the world's great textile and garment cultures.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not photographs from these shows.

Four Events, One Industry

India's fashion week calendar, as recorded in this guide, is a conversation between institutions. India Fashion Week is managed by the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI), the council formed to represent Indian designers' interests and nurture the industry's growth. Lakme Fashion Week, organized jointly by the Lakme beauty brand and IMG Fashion, was conceived to redefine the future of fashion and integrate India into the global fashion world, and runs twice a year. The Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week presents itself as one of India's biggest fashion business events, bringing agents, buyers and experts from overseas to its runways and exhibition area. Delhi Fashion Week, the capital's own event, set out to turn Delhi into an important fashion destination with an innovative format.

Read together, the four records show an industry building its institutions in public: a designers' council on the model of London's British Fashion Council, New York's CFDA and the Paris chambre; sponsor-backed weeks in Mumbai and Delhi; and a recurring argument, stated in each event's own account, that Indian fashion's heritage of textile and craft is the foundation its contemporary design stands on.

India in the World Directory

The full country directory linked from the event pages places India among the world's fashion week countries, from Africa to the United States. For the wider industry behind the runway, the India fashion industry pages on this site cover the country's garment and textile trade in depth, and the four event pages in this guide each link their own industry and news resources.

How the Four Events Divide the Work

The four Indian events in this guide can be read as a division of labour. The council event, India Fashion Week, represents the designers collectively. The two sponsor-named events, Lakme in Mumbai and Wills Lifestyle, carry the commercial and media weight of their title brands — a beauty company in one case, a lifestyle brand in the other. Delhi Fashion Week works the capital-city angle, building Delhi itself into a fashion destination. A designer deciding where to show could weigh those offers against each other, and a buyer deciding where to travel could do the same.

Underneath the division sits a shared inheritance the events all claim: India's textile and craft heritage, from handloom and embroidery traditions to one of the world's largest garment industries. The weeks differ in institution and city; the material culture they present is one.