The Fabric of Home

In a Pune house that answers to the number on its door, a designer raised among fabrics is quietly rewriting what it means to dress well.

Nishigandha Khaladkar grew up inside her mother’s boutique in Pune — a childhood measured out in bolts of cloth, half-finished hems and the patient rhythm of the tailor’s table. Her mother stitched clothes with her own hands, and her daughter absorbed the craft the way children absorb a mother tongue, thinking about clothes, sketching clothes, designing her own before she quite knew that designing could be a profession. When she eventually took over the boutique and founded her own label, it felt less like a beginning than a continuation — the same thread, picked up and carried forward.

The partnership endures. Nishigandha looks after most of the execution today, whilst her mother remains closely involved in the designing — two generations working the same studio floor, each shaping the other’s eye. The clients her mother had gathered over decades passed naturally into her care, and with her mother beside her to guide the handover, the transition was, by her own account, remarkably smooth.

Her formal training came at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad — India’s first design institute, born of Jawaharlal Nehru’s conviction that a newly independent nation deserved a design education of its own, and established with the support of the Sarabhai family of Ahmedabad and the Ford Foundation on the learning principles of Germany’s Bauhaus. There she read for a Master’s in Apparel Design, a discipline she is careful to distinguish from fashion design proper. Apparel, she explains, embraces everything wearable — functional clothing, uniforms, garments for athletes — and the course pressed its students to question what a garment could even be made of. She remembers constructing clothes out of origami. Of the handful of Pune students admitted to NID in her year, she was the only one in apparel design.

She returned from Ahmedabad to find her first clients waiting in familiar places. Years of theatre and dance in Pune had left her with friends across the city’s stages, many of whom had since moved into the Marathi film industry — and they came to her for costumes. Behind her stood her mother’s network, decades in the making. Word of mouth did the rest.

At the heart of her practice sits a conviction distilled into the studio’s tagline: conscious clothing. Every client is met in person before a single sketch is drawn. What do they do? How do they live? What hangs in their wardrobe, and what actually gets worn? Only then does she begin. The measure of her work is not how many garments a client leaves with, but how far a single garment can travel — worn many ways, on many occasions, across many seasons.

She holds an unfashionably clear-eyed view of fashion itself. The younger generation of Indian designers, she observes, is no longer following the traditional arc — the grand design house, the runway show, the lakh-rupee lehenga. Her ambition was never a maison whose collections walk the ramp. It was, and remains, a good business — clothes that the majority of people can genuinely wear, thoughtfully made and quietly chic.

All of it unfolds at Studio 139, housed in her ancestral home and named, with characteristic understatement, after the number on its door. Visitors are occasionally announced by the family dog, who takes the stairs at speed. It seems fitting that a designer whose philosophy begins with how people truly live should work from the house she grew up in — the same rooms, the same thread, carried forward still.