Most of us carry a few small things from childhood that never quite leave: the pattern on a curtain, the sound of a particular room, a photograph gone soft at the edges. Ordinary, and somehow permanent.
That is the territory CORD stepped into with its Fall Winter 2026 collection, the label's first fashion presentation The Clouds Beneath Us in New Delhi. Staged at the iconic Kamani Auditorium, it followed a young girl through a world shaped by memories of his mother. It was less a runway than a world, with music, movement and light doing as much of the talking as the clothes.
It has taken eleven years to get here, and CORD has never seemed in a hurry. What began as everyday clothing and handcrafted leather goods has grown into something closer to a point of view. It lives in hand smocking, embroidery, appliqué, kantha, beadwork and block and screen printing, and in the stores and the stories behind each season. FW26 pulls those threads together, taking pieces of CORD's own past and asking what they might become now.
We spoke to Neha Singh and Pranav Guglani, the duo behind the label, about why now, what memory looks like as a collection, how to grow without losing the human hand, and what the next decade might hold.
After 11 years of building the brand, what made now the right moment to present CORD’s world through fashion theatre for the first time?
Neha: I don’t think there was a particular moment when we decided, “This is the time.” It felt more like something that had been building naturally. Over eleven years, CORD has developed a world of its own, through the clothes, the prints, the craft, the stores and the stories behind the collections. We eventually felt ready to bring all of those things together in one experience.
Pranav: We’ve also never been very interested in doing something simply because the industry expects you to. The idea of a show had to feel relevant to CORD. When this collection started becoming more narrative and theatrical, it felt like the right opportunity to do it.
The presentation moves beyond the traditional runway and brings together theatre, music, movement, art and storytelling. What did you want the audience to experience or feel when they entered the CORD universe that they might not get from simply seeing the clothes on a runway?
Pranav: We wanted people to experience the collection rather than just look at it.
Neha: The collection is about memory and imagination, and those are very sensory things. Clothes can communicate a lot, but music, movement, light and theatre can take you somewhere emotionally that a garment on its own may not.
Pranav: We wanted the audience to temporarily enter this world we’ve created, rather than feel like they were simply watching something happen on a runway.
Neha: And hopefully, somewhere within that world, they find something that reminds them of their own memories.
The FW26 collection revisits silhouettes, techniques and motifs that have appeared throughout CORD’s journey. How did you decide what from the past deserved to be brought back, and what needed to be reinterpreted for where CORD is today?
Neha: We spent a lot of time looking back. Eleven years gives you a lot to revisit. There were certain techniques and silhouettes that immediately felt like CORD to us, but we didn’t want to simply reproduce them.
Pranav: The question was more about what still felt relevant. If something had a certain emotional connection to us but didn’t make sense in its original form, we’d take it apart and look at it differently.
Neha: So the collection isn’t really about looking backwards. It’s about taking pieces of our own history and seeing what they can become now.
CORD has spent years working with techniques such as hand smocking, embroidery, appliqué, kantha, beadwork, block printing and screen printing. As the brand grows, how do you protect the intimacy and individuality of these processes while presenting them to a much larger audience?
Pranav: For us, scale shouldn’t mean standardisation. That’s something we’re quite conscious about.
Neha: The beauty of these techniques is precisely that they aren’t completely perfect or uniform. We want the hand to remain visible. That’s what gives every piece its character.
Pranav: It also comes down to the relationships we have with the people who make the clothes. These aren’t processes we want to industrialise simply because the brand is growing.
Neha: We’d rather grow carefully and retain that individuality than grow at the cost of what makes the work special.
You have previously spoken about CORD being influenced by the places you travel, the books you read and the people you meet. What were some of the specific memories, places, images or experiences that found their way into FW26?
Neha: A lot of it came from childhood and from the very ordinary things that become strangely precious when you look back. Memories of home, our mothers, old photographs, objects, fabrics and places that stay with you.
Pranav: There were also references to travel and the way you remember a place after you’ve left it. Sometimes it’s not the big landmark you remember, but a colour, a sound, a room, a particular object.
Neha: That’s really what we were interested in. Not nostalgia as something literal, but those small fragments that remain somewhere in your mind and resurface much later.
After this first presentation, what does the next chapter of CORD look like to you? Has working on FW26 changed the way you think about what the brand can become over the next decade?
Neha: The show definitely made us realise that there are many more ways to tell the CORD story than we had previously imagined.
Pranav: It has made us think beyond the conventional boundaries of fashion. When you bring together theatre, music, art, craft and clothing, you realise how much more space there is to explore.
Neha: But we don’t have a very fixed idea of what the next ten years should look like.
Pranav: That’s intentional. We’d rather leave some room for discovery.
Neha: The most important thing is that CORD continues to evolve without losing its curiosity.
Pranav: We’ve spent the first eleven years building the language. Maybe the next decade is about seeing how many different ways we can speak it.