Mayyur Girotra Wants You To Understand The Weight Of The Thread

There is a shawl that Mayyur Girotra does not wear. It belongs, technically, to him now—passed through the hands of time, from grandmother to grandson—but he cannot bring himself to put it on. It is a mousse-coloured Pashmina, impossibly fine, threaded with Kachnar bootas that have begun, in places, to unravel. He keeps it folded. He takes it out sometimes, just to touch it. His mother wore it a few weeks ago, just before the summer arrived, and he stood there watching her and felt, he says, as though his grandmother had walked back into the room.

This is where Mayyur Girotra lives—in that charged, tender space between memory and material. It is a place he has occupied his whole life, long before he became a designer. It is also, finally, the place from which his newest initiative, The Collectables, has emerged: not as a collection in the conventional fashion sense, but as something closer to a formal declaration of everything he has always quietly believed.

"The Collectables has been happening since forever for me. Every room you walk into—whether it's my office or my home—there's something or the other. My friends always used to call me a hoarder."

The Delhi-born designer's route to fashion was, famously, indirect. A commerce graduate from London, nearly a decade in wealth management in Dubai, and then the pivot finally came. He launched his eponymous label in 2009 with two sewing machines and one masterji, and built it, steadily, into a global couture house with presence across India, the US, London and Dubai. His clothes—soaked in phulkari and patola, in Chanderi silk and upcycled brocade—have been worn by Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt, Sonam Kapoor, and the first families of Indian industry. But the sensibility behind all of it was never really about fashion. It was about inheritance.

Girotra grew up in a household where textiles were taken seriously. His mother collected sarees with the fervour of a scholar—Gadwal, Kanjivaram, Patan Patola, Kota, Tanchoi. His grandmother moved through winters wrapped in that impeccable Pashmina. The Kashmiri craftsmen would arrive at the house with shawls they had woven themselves. He was absorbing all of it, an education with no classroom, no syllabus. He could touch a fabric, he tells me, and tell you whether it was handloom or machine loom, silk or mixed, authentic or not. This skill did not come from design school, but from being present in rooms where these things were handled with reverence.

The Collectables formalises that reverence. At its core, it is an initiative that sources rare, historic Indian textiles—old Kutch work, ikat weaves, Kanjivaram silk, batiks, Suzani embroideries, Soof work—and reimagines them into couture heirlooms. Each piece is intentionally limited. Each carries a handwritten tag stitched into the garment: "My child, I got this piece made for you." The date, the year, the maker's name, that marks itself as a document of its own existence.

"You will throw 10,000 things—polyester, fast fashion, travel T-shirts—but you will never throw your indigo, your Bandhani, your Ghar Chola. Even if it tears, you won't throw it. Because subconsciously, we know what it is."

When I meet Girotra, he is days away from leaving for Calcutta to meet antique dealers, textile weavers, the usual circuit. He has just returned from a showcase. He is already somewhere else in his mind, already in the next sourcing trip, the next discovery. He travels constantly: to Barmer and Kanchipuram, to the villages near Jaipur and Jodhpur where women still practise embroideries that most of the world has no name for. The textile trail, for him, is not research in the academic sense, but compulsion.

He tells me about a woman in Barmer who handed him old patches she had been working on—pieces of embroidery she had likely assumed would disappear into the market and never be spoken of again. He went back and carried photographs. He showed her what he had done with her work, how he had used her technique, how the finished garment had been worn. She kept looking at the images in silence.

"Suddenly, they feel like artists," he says. "Not like, 'we were taught this as kids and we're just doing it to earn ₹500 or ₹1,000 a day.' On a grassroots level, it really satisfies me a lot. I would never say this is my work."

This, perhaps, is what separates The Collectables from the more performative iterations of sustainability we've grown accustomed to seeing on fashion week runways. Girotra is not interested in sustainability as a branding exercise. He is interested in it as a moral position. He speaks, unprompted, about artisans putting their hands into boiling water for tie-and-dye work. About how the word luxury is applied to a finished product with no acknowledgement of the pain embedded in its making. About how Indian craft communities have been exploited so thoroughly and for so long that we are only now beginning to reckon with the consequences—which is to say, we are losing the crafts themselves.

"Anything done by hand is luxury. Not just embroidery—anything. And yet here, sadly, we are still in a very different space."

"Our country has overexploited these communities so much," he says. "And today we are paying the price for it."

The price, as he sees it, is generational. He describes visiting weavers in Kanchipuram—four generations of a family, sitting in their homes, weaving not just for themselves but to keep a tradition alive. Their children, he notes, have mostly left. They've moved to cities, taken up other professions. They don't see a future in the loom. And he does not blame them. He understands, with the clarity of someone who has sat with these families, that dignity and craft cannot be separated. You cannot ask a community to keep making beautiful things in poverty and call it cultural preservation.

The Collectables works with immigrant women in villages near Jaipur and Jodhpur, alongside traditional weavers and small artisan communities. The model is built around transparency—no middlemen where possible, direct sourcing, fair wages. It is modest in scale, deliberately so. Girotra knows the limits of what one label can do, but he is unbothered by them. "Even if I can make small changes—even if it's for 7, 8, 10 people—I'm okay with that."

There is something quietly radical about this position in an industry that tends toward grand gestures and large claims. The Collectables does not promise to save Indian craft. It promises to treat the people who make it with dignity, to tell their stories honestly, and to create objects that will outlast the season they were made in. That is the definition of a collectable, as Girotra sees it: not rarity for rarity's sake, but something handmade, time-consuming, irreplaceable. Something that carries within it the evidence of human effort. Something you will never throw away.

He is also doing things that surprise you. Zardozi on denim! Couture embroidery applied to a fabric we have long dismissed as casual, democratic, ordinary. Because denim, he argues, is another forever material—it ages, it holds, it becomes more itself over time. The same principle as the Pashmina. The same logic: make something worth keeping.

The tag stitched into every Collectables garment—"My child, I got this piece made for you"—is the whole philosophy condensed into a sentence. It is the letter a parent writes to a child who hasn't been born yet. It is the assumption that the object will still matter decades from now, that someone will pull it out of tissue paper and feel, as Girotra did when his mother wore the shawl, that a presence has returned to the room.

Series One of The Collectables has already dropped. Series Two is imminent. And Girotra is already in Calcutta, or on his way there, searching for the next piece of something old that deserves to be carried forward.