Fifteen years into his design practice, Nimish Shah is returning with Shift, a label shaped by his evolving relationship with clothes, materials and the act of making. Shah, who later served as Creative Director at Bhaane, has spent his career exploring the relationship between design, material and everyday clothing. The return is less about starting over than looking at a familiar practice with greater clarity. The instinct, he says, remains the same: “The return was pretty much the certain sense of love for making clothes and just like, you know, love for fashion. I think it’s more clothes than fashion and more product.”
What has changed is the confidence. After years of experimentation and reading the room, Shah has a clearer sense of what he wants to make and how he wants to take that creative expression forward. “I feel it’s all the same, but with a little bit more strength and confidence.”
That sense of clarity runs through Shift’s foundations. The label has always been rooted in what Shah describes as Gandhian modernism, though for him, the idea was never simply about creating a menswear label around a particular philosophy. It was about developing a way of thinking. Over time, his personal aesthetic became the house aesthetic, with an emphasis on material before form and an interest in the full spectrum of textiles. “My personal aesthetic, which then became house aesthetic, was a lot more quiet, not necessarily in a minimalist sense of the way, but it was more material forward, material before form,” he says.
For Shah, the Gandhian element also comes down to something more practical: common sense. It is about considering systems, the environment and the people involved in making and consuming a product, rather than treating sustainability as a set of rigid rules.
His approach has become increasingly conversational, shaped by listening to the community around him and responding to what is happening in the present. Aesthetically, he describes himself as more postmodernist, willing to experiment without designing towards a predetermined category. “We try a bunch of things, hopefully, and inevitably, everything fits in one box. But I don’t think we design from box out.”
That resistance to fixed definitions extends to the way he thinks about sustainability and product. Shah is less interested in fashion as a fleeting idea than in the fundamentals of making something well: the fit, construction, materials and discipline behind the finished object. He talks about an “inventory of things that become fashionable by usage”, where individual pieces can remain relevant because they work, rather than because they have been designed to chase a particular moment.
It also explains why he is interested in making clothes that feel familiar, but never entirely unchanged. Shift, quite literally, is about making an adjustment. Shah is not interested in shock value or making something deliberately edgy. Instead, the shift can happen through proportion, material or the way a garment is adapted to the person wearing it.
He points to the difference between Western clothing traditionally developed around European bodies and the way people actually dress in India. A Chinese scholar shirt, for instance, might be made boxier and roomier while still creating a slimmer overall appearance. These are relatively small interventions, but they change the experience of the garment. “When you get into the garments, you kind of know, oh, yeah, this looks very, very standard. But it is elevated in the way it is made.” For Shah, that adjustment is ultimately the reason for the piece to exist. “If there is no shift within that, there’s really no purpose for it to be in the collection.”
The same thinking informs his relationship with objects. Shah is conscious that fashion, by its nature, involves creating things that people do not necessarily need. That makes the question of difference even more important. If something is going to enter an already crowded world of products, what makes it worth making? Storytelling, for Shah, comes after the creative expression itself. The product has to offer a genuinely different route rather than relying on a narrative to make it feel new.
His idea of luxury is similarly open-ended. Shah does not see luxury as something that belongs exclusively to a particular price point, material or category. It can exist in the experience of buying something exceptional in a beautiful store, but it can also be found in a 40-year-old sari that has been carefully preserved and continues to hold meaning. “I think sense of luxury is an everyday phenomenon, you need to witness it,” he says. Luxury, then, is less a fixed definition than a way of looking at and valuing the things around us.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Shift’s return is that Shah is not interested in making craftsmanship precious for the sake of it. He wants to think about the space between industrial production and the rarefied world of fine craft, where skills can still be developed, practised and passed on while producing objects at a scale that allows more people to experience them. Through an artist residency and collective conversations around the future of Shift, he has been exploring what this could look like. The idea is what he calls “mass craft”: maintaining the skill and alternative knowledge of craft while moving beyond the idea that it must remain exclusive.
It points towards a practice that is still evolving, but with a stronger sense of what it wants to contribute. For Shah, returning to Shift is not really about returning to the past. It is about taking what he has learned from the years in between and applying it to the same fundamental question: what is worth making, and how can it be made better?
Fifteen years on, the answer seems to lie in the details. A different proportion. A considered material. A familiar garment approached from another angle.