Out of Office: Aneeth Arora Reimagines Alternative Dressing for Working Men
The fashion designer shares thoughts on Péro’s take on playful workwear and why
Nearly two decades since its debut at Lakmé Fashion week in 2009, fashion designer Aneeth Arora and her brand Péro have gone Out of Office with the latest collection showcased at Lakmé Fashion Week x FDCI 2026.
An alternative way to routine dressing, the Grand Finale transformed the runway into a whimsical corporate landscape, where the chaos of the everyday grind met moments of pause and escape.
With Saiyarra famed actor Aneet Padda embodying the expressive spirit of the show as the showstopper, the collection unfolded as a meditation on duality. Arora reimagined the rigid codes of workwear through a lens of play and restraint by only creating looks by sticking to two colours- Blue and White.
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In a conversation with Esquire India ahead of the showcase, Arora, who spends close to two years developing each collection, shared the genesis of Out of Office. The latest collection is quintessentially a reflection of the brand. Its created directly on the table instead of sketched for the runway, and driven by fantastic storytelling.
At its core, Out of Office finds inspiration in the everyday. Familiar motifs are softened and reinterpreted with a sense of play: pinstripes loosen into something more fluid, while classic office codes are subtly subverted. “It’s about alternative dressing to the office,” Arora explains, “where there are rules, but you’re subtly breaking them—otherwise monotony sets in.”
Talking about the starting point of the collection from her Delhi studio a few days ahead of the season, Arora reveals that the inspiration began in the most ordinary of places. On a holiday. She noticed a stripe- that can work very well as a holiday attire and as workwear. And the versatility stuck with her.
“Anything mundane can inspire me or bring me joy,” she explains. “I loved how the same stripe could exist in two very different worlds. It felt perfect to reinterpret office dressing through our lens—restrained yet playful. It’s almost like alternative office dressing, where there are rules to follow, but you subtly break them, otherwise monotony sets in. That’s where the season began.”
On The Péro Man
On menswear, that spirit of subversion becomes even more pronounced. The Péro vocabulary has long embraced fluidity, dissolving the boundaries between menswear and womenswear. Though, the brand largely caters to clothes for all- women, men and even kids, Arora reflects that “those boundaries were created by us. They’ve always been fluid.”
So, on the runway, this translated into softened silhouettes and playful interventions—ties reworked into bows, sculptural accessories, and layered textures that reimagine traditional office dressing. The p é r o man, as Arora describes him, is guided less by convention and more by instinct. He “does not have any rules to follow and has his own sense of style… someone who has a unique way of putting things together.”
Most importantly, she adds, he is “in touch with his inner child.”
This season, that story is stitched itself in a disciplined palette of blue and white, through rich textiles and an interplay of pinstripes, Riviera lines, ginghams, and reimagined toile making the collection move from boardrooms to holiday easily. Out of Office extends the metaphor of holidays and escapes from work.
Arora’s process, much like her clothes, resists convention. Forgoing traditional sketching, she works directly with fabric—draping, cutting, and constructing instinctively. “If you find a method to the madness, you can go as crazy as you want,” she says—a philosophy that continues to define péro’s intuitive, material-led approach.
The same philosophy finds itself reinterpreted in Out of Office.
"It's kind of very radical because it's not possible to imagine workspaces without rules," she explains.
"The way I look at it is that if you find some method to the madness, then, you know, you can go as crazy as you want," Arora concludes.