Of Love
and Logic

Nearly two decades of couture, built on equal measures of passion and precision.

Pune has a particular kind of afternoon light that seems to slow everything down — the dust settling, the city exhaling, time becoming briefly negotiable. It is the sort of light that suits a certain kind of work: unhurried, considered, made by hand. Ritu B. has been doing exactly that kind of work for nearly two decades.

She does not speak about her career the way one might expect — with the clipped efficiency of someone who has rehearsed their story for press, or the breathless enthusiasm of someone still surprised by their own success. She speaks the way she works: steadily, without unnecessary flourish, with a quiet confidence in the value of what she has made and the time it took to make it.

It began, as so many things do, at home. There was a sewing machine. There was a mother who used it. And there was a young girl who watched, and then, quietly, began to try. “I used to experiment with the machine,” she says. “Stitch small clothes. Just exploring — nothing serious.” She pauses, almost amused by the modesty of those beginnings. “But it came naturally to me. I was very good at it.”

She went on to read for a BA in Fashion in Delhi, and thereafter cut her professional teeth in Mumbai, before family drew her back to Pune — permanently, as it turned out. “I never left after that,” she says simply. One senses she never needed to.

What distinguishes Ritu B. from the considerable noise of contemporary fashion is a philosophy that is at once disarmingly simple and remarkably difficult to sustain: love and logic in equal measure. “There is love in what I do,” she says, “and there is logic to it. This is not just a career for me. It is a passion.” In an era that speaks endlessly of authenticity whilst rarely demonstrating it, she is the genuine article.

She was twenty-four when she started. The market was resistant, the marketing expensive, and the digital tools that designers now take for granted were either nascent or entirely absent. There was no Instagram to court a following. Newspaper advertising was a considerable outlay. Finding skilled workers was a persistent challenge.

And yet. “When you are driven by passion, when you are driven by your natural instinct,” she reflects, “difficult work does not become a problem. You see it as a challenge.” She is careful to stop short of romanticising hardship. “I would not say I liked the challenges,” she concedes, with a trace of a smile. “But I always found a way to work around them. I have never seen difficulty as a step back.”

Her earliest clientele, as is so often the case with the most enduring practices, were friends — and friends of friends — who recognised something worth keeping. Twenty years on, those same clients have not merely stayed; their children have arrived. “The earliest customers I worked with are still with me,” she says. “I stitch clothes for their children now.” She pauses, and when she continues, there is something close to wonder in her voice. “I see it as a validation — of the hard work, of the quality I give to my clients.”

It is on the subject of fashion education that Ritu B. speaks with the greatest urgency — and, one suspects, the greatest frustration. Her studio has, over the years, mentored a considerable number of interns and fashion graduates, and what she has observed gives her pause.

“They lack the basic skills,” she says plainly. “Manipulating fabric, colouring techniques, measurement — these are the foundational things. Most students spend four years in college, paying fees of nearly five lakhs per year, and when they come out, they have nothing to show for it.” The retraining, she notes, falls to practitioners like herself. “What was supposed to be taught in college, we teach again here.”

Her recommendation to students is unequivocal: prioritise the technical. She singles out one institution for particular praise — SOFT, a Pune-based college whose graduates, she says, arrive work-ready and require no remedial attention whatsoever. “We simply give them the work, and we are confident it will be done.” In a landscape of sweeping generalisations, it is a commendation worth noting.

The Ritu B. of today is not only a couturier to Pune’s most discerning clientele — though she remains fiercely committed to them — but a businesswoman of considerable breadth. There is a bulk manufacturing unit. There is consulting work for fashion designers and industrial houses. And there is BellPep Lifestyle, her online retail brand, through which her collections are beginning to reach an audience beyond the intimate world of bespoke commissions.

A Shopify store is on the horizon, and one imagines it will be received warmly by those who have not yet had the pleasure of discovering what her long-standing clients have known for twenty years: that there is, in Ritu B.’s work, a particular and lasting quality — the kind that does not date, does not disappoint, and does not, under any circumstances, cut corners.