How Designer Sukh Sohal Is Interpreting India And Punjab

SUKH SOHAL HATES NOSTALGIA. THE KIND THAT has become a design aesthetic. One that places people against a random old house with a few familiar visual cues and calls it India when the modern-day country looks far from it.

What he does believe in is aspiration, not in the language of affluence but through the desire to see, live and experience life. For Sohal, loving a culture means allowing it to evolve. The idea is to drag Punjabi culture into the present, give it a bassline, put it on a body and see what happens. So far, that love has found its way into two different ventures, lahoS and Jawani 4eva.

Sohal grew up in a Punjabi household in Luton, England, where India was always present in bits and pieces. Sometimes it showed up in music and food. Sometimes through annual summer trips and weddings. “As a kid, I despised it,” he recalls those annual trips where Spain or France seemed considerably more appealing than yet another family holiday to India. “When we were at home, we experienced India, we experienced Punjab and then we’d step out into the world of Britain”, he says.

Music perhaps was his gateway into Punjabi culture. While that may have been the first bridge, the turning point came in university. He found himself surrounded by friends who spoke and joked in Punjabi, making him inhabit a youth culture he had never really experienced himself. “I think people have them at different moments in the diaspora where it kind of clicks. Every youth has those moments at different times in different periods. For example, we had the big South Asian music moments happening here, where people started having their identity crisis kind of solved because they found individuals who follow similar music to them,” he points out.

After working in finance and banking in the UK, Sohal found himself with an unusually long non-compete clause and a lot of time to figure out what to do with his life. He had no formal fashion background. He simply liked clothes. So impulsively, he decided to start a clothing brand in India. The decision was met with more than a little scepticism at home. His grandfather had moved to the UK when he was young, building a life for the family that would follow. To his family, Sohal’s move from the UK back to India, seemed like moving backwards.

He instead decided to lean into the idea. His label, ‘lahoS’, is his surname flipped backwards and the right-to-left name also nods to Shahmukhi and Urdu. A joke about moving backwards became a brand built around looking forward. Meanwhile, Delhi made its own kind of sense with young designers, artisans, manufacturers and an increasingly restless fashion ecosystem.

The easiest way to put the designer off is to lean too heavily on nostalgia. “It’s a very easy one to fall upon because you have memory and you’re reinventing what’s already existed,” Sohal adds. Living in India has also changed the way he sees what modern-day India and Punjab look like and, more importantly, what they don’t. “I don’t want to just put someone in a random old house and be like, okay, cool, just stand there, look nice, to show that this person is in Punjab. Because Punjab doesn’t look like that. India doesn’t look like that.” Sohal says the palaces and old homes exist, of course, but they don’t represent how most people live.

So, lahoS looks elsewhere. The brand’s SS26 campaign, set in a pind with a cast of older men, has been quick to grab eyeballs. It features real locations, unconventional faces and a rawness that feels closer to life. While speaking of shooting the recent campaign in the pind, he recalls two older, local men wandering over to see what was happening. They caught Sohal’s eye immediately, so much so that he convinced them to try on the clothes and be a part of the campaign. “I definitely think older people are just so much more interesting when you’re casting than individuals who just look beautiful,” he adds.

If lahoS is Sohal’s love letter to India through fashion, Jawani 4eva is his ode to Punjabi culture through music. Its story began with a lie. While preparing to move to India, Sohal wanted to throw a leaving party in London but had no venue or experience as a promoter. He told the club he was one. They gave him the space, he threw the party and moved on. Except people started messaging the club asking when the next one was. By then, Sohal had already moved to India. Six months later, he returned to London for another party, then another, and Jawani 4eva became a quarterly fixture.

When Sohal eventually threw a party in London while he was in India, everyone seemed to be enjoying, only this time it was without him. So he did what any rational founder would do: he threw one in Delhi for good measure. That was the beginning of Jawani 4eva’s life beyond London. After Delhi, Toronto, New York, Australia, Dubai and Malta followed suit.

The motivation, he says, was never really business. “When I was a youth, I didn’t really find youth culture. I didn’t have exposure to it. I wanted to create that exposure to Punjabi youth culture,” he explains. The idea was simple: no caricatures, no forced nostalgia, no selling people a version of Punjabi culture that doesn’t exist. Just let it be young, loud and have a good time. “Jawani is for everyone. It doesn't matter if you’re Punjabi or not.” It leaves Punjabi culture in its rawest form. It’s loud, communal, musical and unfiltered. Meanwhile lahoS occupies a different space. It’s more contemporary and considered.

Before we close the video interview, we ask Sohal the three rules to throw a banger party. First, get the sound right. “If you can’t feel the music, no one’s going to be enjoying themselves.” It needs to be loud, thumping and good enough to feel the beats in your chest. Second, get the DJs right. “Don’t just put your friends on.” At Jawani 4eva, they call it pushing Punjabi prestige with DJs who are looking for something new, cool and interesting rather than recycling whatever is already doing the rounds on Reels. Third: “Don’t sell a dream.” Don’t promise people an experience you can’t deliver. Don’t dress something up more than it is because it makes for an easier sell.

Perhaps that’s the simplest way to understand Sohal’s approach to everything he does. His work is a love letter to his culture but not a nostalgic one. He’d rather keep it alive and moving, letting the people in it recognise themselves.

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