The Comfort Revolutionary

Pimpri-Chinchwad’s Gitali Lalwani on nail art, second acts, and the quiet confidence of Jaipur block print.

Fearlessness, for some women, arrives only at forty-five — and rarely as a feeling so much as a decision. For Gitali Lalwani, it landed the moment her children settled into college and her mornings became, for the first time in two decades, entirely her own.

It would not be her first reinvention. In her twenties, Gitali was already building a career in fashion design. Then came marriage, and motherhood — which, quite rightly in her view, took precedence. The career paused; her creative instincts did not. In whatever pockets of time she could find between her responsibilities as a mother, she trained in nail art, then barely known on Indian soil, and within six months had earned herself a name across the whole of PCMC.

Now that her children have grown and entered college, she has stepped back into the world of fashion design — a pursuit she had paused for more than two decades.

Gitali Designer Studio began as ethnic separates: co-ord sets, three-piece dupatta ensembles, mix-and-match kurtis and salwars, stitched through a contact in Jaipur. Within a year it had outgrown its supply chain, and Gitali opened her own production unit there — compact, captive, four to five stitchers and two devoted entirely to block printing. The result, launched under her own label, Sukoon, is precisely what its name promises: comfort, rendered in hand-block print.

“A girl should look beautiful in it, and feel the most comfortable she’s ever felt.” Her scepticism toward the high street is pointed: mall-sale clothes so often look right and feel wrong, the fabric souring against the skin within a wear. Three years post-pandemic, Sukoon’s pitch — fashion, but undemanding of the body — has found its moment.

If one piece is doing the most talking on her behalf, it is the farshi salwar — a flared, floor-grazing Jaipur block-print silhouette Gitali believes she may currently be the only designer stocking in the PCMC belt. A young celebrity prop designer reportedly tried ten stores before finding it at Gitali’s door, then bought three pieces on the spot. It is, Gitali notes, a generational pattern: young women dress Western daily, but return — deliberately, almost ceremonially — to Indian and fusion silhouettes for festivals. Jaipur prints are exactly where that homecoming is happening.

Ask who her first customers were, and she corrects the assumption: not friends, not family — always strangers. Friends arrive out of loyalty; strangers arrive only if the work earns it.

Complaints, she says, are rare — and almost never about fabric quality, which she regards as non-negotiable. When doubt does arise, she listens first and responds gently. A long-time client once returned a corset-and-trouser set convinced the fabric had failed her after it creased from sitting cross-legged. Gitali simply explained that a structured trouser is not designed to be sat in that way — a small clarification, offered kindly, that left the matter settled. Her door is always open to anyone who wants to browse without pressure; a sale, for her, is never really the point.

For three years, Gitali has held to a private rule: no personal profit drawn from the business. Everything goes back in. Eighteen months in, the progress already speaks for itself. She credits a supportive husband, and a family that has never stopped encouraging the leap. Her daughter, away at university, occasionally models for Sukoon; bikes, rather than block print, are said to be her true passion.

What stays with you, talking to Gitali Lalwani, is the unhurried certainty of a woman who tried something at twenty, paused it for two decades, and picked it back up at forty-five as though no time had passed — because, in the way that matters, none had.