Entrepreneur Sanjay Nigam on Indian Men,the Business of Fashion and Pitch To Get Rich

“For too long, Indian men dressed for occasions. Weddings. Festivals. Graduations. That era is over,” says Sanjay Nigam, founder of the Fashion Entrepreneur Fund (FEF) and the brain behind the new JioHotstar show Pitch to Get Rich co-produced by Dharmatic Entertainment , as he reflects on the evolving sartorial sensibilities of the modern Indian man.

“The new Indian man is done borrowing tuxedos from Europe and kurtas from his father’s wardrobe. He’s experimenting with soft tailoring, heritage textiles, fine jewellery, skincare, and silhouettes that scream identity and autonomy in expression through style.”

In an interview with Esquire India, Nigam observes that this fluidity in men’s fashion is not only restricted to aesthetics, it’s relevance to the cultural shift.

“Fluidity is cool. It’s about no longer needing to break any stereotypes because he is slowly on his way to do that with the exposure he is getting in the digital age. He wears his individuality with pride and allows his clothes to be that extension.”

Through his platforms, Nigam is backing the new language of menswear as well as Indian fashion entrepreneurship, generally. “Through the Fashion Entrepreneurs Fund, we’re backing founders who are building smart separates, men’s accessories and footwear, jewellery—pieces that look global but think Indian. Masculinity has already evolved and the global Indian is right there,” he tells.

Nigam’s own journey mirrors this blend of tradition and modernity, creative flair and business acumen. “I’m Lucknow-bred. Craft, etiquette, and enterprise run in my bloodstream. You grow up in a city like that, you understand that refinement and that small-town raw zeal can take you if you hustle hard. My earliest instinct was to build platforms. I wanted to create stages where talent, ambition, and audience could meet in one frame.”

From La Finesse to India Bridal Fashion Week to the FEF Global Fashion Awards, each initiative taught him how to transform creativity into a commercially viable ecosystem. “It taught me the language of how to turn fashion into a viable commercial ecosystem and how to create India and Indianness in the minds of every global fashion ecosystem. It is not possible without capital, and I knew it early on that I needed to do something about it.”

The Fashion Entrepreneur Fund (FEF) and Pitch to Get Rich are, in Nigam’s words, “the sum of those lessons.” While FEF gives founders capital, mentorship, and customers, Pitch to Get Rich “flipped the entire model. We put funding on prime time. Fourteen founders, ₹40 crore on the table, Bollywood and business in one frame( including a judging‑investor panel combining Bollywood names like Karan Johar, Akshay Kumar, Malaika Arora and Manish Malhotra with business leaders such as Ravi Jaipuria, Gaurav Dalmia and others). Because fashion deserves the same investment vocabulary as tech.”

For Nigam, the pressing issue in Indian fashion has never been talent, but access to capital and infrastructure. “Designers were doing world-class work but operating in silos, waiting for validation from investors who were keen only on established designers—and that’s okay. There was no national funnel for discovery, high visibility, and pan-India MBO deals. That’s why I built Pitch to Get Rich. We fused storytelling with term sheets, where investors, mentors, and buyers met founders in the same frame. That’s the new runway now.”

The fashion entrepreneur believes in making Indian fashion globally investable. “Paris and Milan didn’t become capitals because they had better taste than us. They became capitals because they built infrastructure: finance, fashion councils that acted like investors, and governments that saw creative industry as a big contributor to GDP. India has the depth. It just needs the distribution architecture."

For Sanjay Nigam, the future of Indian fashion is a fusion of ancestral creativity and strategic commerce. “Once you plug creativity into capital, you get a fashion economy. India’s next unicorns won’t come from fintech, they’ll come from fashion. This is a country where artisans can out-innovate algorithms if you give them capital.”