When Raw Mango arrived at London Fashion Week with its Fall/Winter 2026 collection It’s Not About The Flower, it wasn’t just another international runway moment. It felt personal, cultural, and deeply rooted in everyday South Asian life.
For its debut presentation on a global fashion stage, the brand turned to something incredibly familiar - the garland. Often overlooked because of its everyday presence, the garland became the emotional starting point of the collection. In South Asia, it exists everywhere: celebrations, rituals, mourning, devotion, welcome. Raw Mango used this idea to explore the space between ornament and identity - shifting attention away from a single flower and towards the collective beauty of arrangement.
Designer and founder Sanjay Garg explained the thought behind the collection, saying, “Flowers remain an important part of South-East Asia and South Asia. But we don’t really have a culture of giving one individual flower to someone, like, say, a rose on Valentine’s Day.” He continues, “As a culture, we are a country of garlands. Whether it’s a death, a birth, a wedding or a religious ritual, you see garlands, irrespective of the religion. It’s not about one individual flower; it’s about the plurality.”
That idea of plurality shaped everything - from silhouettes to storytelling. Rather than treating decoration as surface embellishment, the collection examined how adornment becomes meaning. It questioned what we consider valuable in fashion: the motif itself or the way elements come together to create emotion and memory.
Showing in London also became an opportunity to challenge long-standing perceptions of Indian fashion abroad. Garg noted that Indian design is still often boxed into stereotypes of heavy embroidery and excessive embellishment. “There is still a strong association between Indian fashion and a certain kind of aesthetic - heavy gold embroidery, and maximalist ensembles that overwhelm the eye and the body with ‘bling’,” he says. “Indian fashion is too often quantified – it's not seen for its innate aesthetic value, but the number of hours it took a weaver to create a garment. It’s a surface-level engagement that sometimes drowns out the beauty of the weave itself.”
On the runway, garments interpreted how a garland might naturally rest on the body. Florals appeared not as literal prints but as sculptural elements - rolled, assembled, and hand-placed using unexpected silk-like fabrics. These arrangements floated across lightly embroidered brocades, ribbed cotton knits, quilted rayon, wool felt, and soft textiles that felt both nostalgic and modern.
The show drew a diverse audience from across art, culture, fashion and business, including musician Anoushka Shankar, former UK First Lady Akshata Murty, filmmaker Gurinder Chadha, and artist Lubna Chowdhary - a fitting mix for a collection that resisted easy categorisation.
For Garg, however, the geography of the show mattered less than the work itself. Reflecting on presenting at London Fashion Week, he said, “Presenting here is as good as presenting in Kanpur for me. At the end of the day, it is the work being presented that matters. And that doesn’t change according to who is viewing it, or where. I’m less interested in defining my audience and more interested in further exploring and articulating my design language that can cater to different audiences that transcends borders and seasons.”
That clarity of purpose has defined Raw Mango for nearly two decades. The label continues to build contemporary fashion through traditional textile knowledge, treating craft not as nostalgia but as a living, evolving language.
The London presentation of It’s Not About The Flower was supported by De Beers Group, with Forevermark as jewellery partner. In many ways, the collection quietly reminded audiences that Indian fashion does not need to shout to be seen. Sometimes, like a garland, its power lies in how individual elements come together - layered, collective, and deeply human.
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