The Long
Way Round

Aarti Rawat says that her profession as a fashion designer requires her to think, at scale, about fit, fabric, and the dignity of dressing women well.

Aarti Rawat was never far from the world of fashion, yet her path to it was never a straight line — it was the accumulation of everything else she had lived. A science graduate. A model. A uniform designer. A mother who gave a decade, without hesitation, to her daughter’s gymnastics career. And now, finally, the founder of Iradha — a bespoke fashion studio opening on Prabhat Road, Pune.

During her graduation days, Rawat had the opportunity to work alongside Manish Rai, Mugdha Godse and Mona Singh. She found her way into advertising, working with Mona Singh and her agency — an environment that rewarded her particular qualities: precision, observation, an instinct for what works. It was an apprenticeship in aesthetics that no fashion school could quite replicate, conducted not in studios but in the everyday business of image-making.

Marriage brought the next chapter, and with it, a pivot that would prove foundational. Her husband already had two established shops in the city. Rawat channelled her design sensibility into something grounded and practical: uniform design. For seven years, she ran the firm with the rigour of someone who understands that clothing is not merely decorative — it is structural. It speaks before the wearer does. Here she worked with Nivedita Saboo, who joined the firm to collaborate on designing the uniforms.

Even while running the firm and raising two young daughters alongside her husband, Aarti entered the Gladrags Mrs. India competition and finished in the top five.

Then, as deliberately as she had stepped forward, she stepped back. Her daughter had a gift — not for fashion, but for gymnastics — and Rawat recognised it for what it was: a claim on her time, and one she honoured without hesitation. For ten years she maintained no collections, cultivated no industry relationships, and entertained no ambitions beyond the singular one of watching her daughter become extraordinary. Which her daughter duly did, competing internationally before retiring with the quiet finality of the truly dedicated.

It was only then, with that chapter closed, that Rawat turned her attention back to herself — and to everything she had always known she still had left to do.

The catalyst, when it came, was magnificently ordinary. She watched her daughter pick up a kurta from a roadside stall for two hundred rupees. The garment that came home was exactly what two hundred rupees will buy: the wrong fit, the wrong fabric, the wrong everything.

For most people, it would have registered as mild irritation and nothing more. For Rawat, it registered as a gap in the market. She already had the manufacturing unit. The infrastructure existed. The knowledge existed. What was missing was simply someone with the conviction to use it differently — to offer women a genuine alternative to the roadside compromise, at a price that did not require a boutique budget. Good fabric. The correct fit. Quality that endures for years. She decided to be that someone.

The brand began in small spaces — the pop-up stalls at exhibitions. Friends and family. Word of mouth. The response was immediate and telling: people noticed the quality, stayed to talk about the designs, and returned. That early validation had the particular weight of truth — unsolicited, unsponsored, real.

From those first kurtas, the vision evolved into something more considered. A design philosophy took hold and refused to let go: Indian fabrics expressed through modern, Western-influenced silhouettes. Heritage and contemporaneity not in conflict but in conversation — which is, as it happens, precisely where Indian fashion is most alive right now.

Her niece Hemani joined the studio on the design side, bringing a generational fluency that has sharpened the offering considerably. Together, they have trained their attention on a customer that the fashion industry persistently underestimates: the Gen Z woman who is not, as the cliché would have it, abandoning Indian culture in favour of western aesthetics, but doing something far more interesting. She is claiming both. Wearing a chanderi fabric cut to a silhouette she found on a Paris runway. Refusing to choose. Rawat finds this not merely commercially interesting but genuinely admirable.

The name came last, and almost by accident. The original choice — Eksut — was unavailable. What emerged in its place was something richer: Iradha, drawn from the names of her two daughters, Radhika and Ira.

The Iradha studio opens on Prabhat Road, Pune, in June — a space for considered, crafted fashion: Indian in its materials and its soul, modern in its cuts and its confidence, uncompromising in its quality. An online presence is being built to carry the vision beyond the city, to women across the country who have, for too long, been offered a choice between the unaffordable and the inadequate.

Aarti Rawat is not, she will tell you, a woman who arrived at this moment quickly. Every detour, every pause, every apparent departure from the path was, it turns out, the path itself. That is the thing about women who arrive at fashion the long way round. When they get there, they know exactly what they are doing.