Backstage at Gundi Studios

Gundi Studio imagines the kind of women who leave the party at sunrise and still have somewhere to be. For SS27, craft, chaos and South Asian heritage collide in a collection made for long nights and messy mornings.

Natasha Sumant from Gundi Studio

At Gundi Studio, founded and led by designer and creative director Natasha Sumant grew from her desire to celebrate outspoken South Asian women through fashion, art and craft. For Spring Summer 2027 at Paris Fashion Week, the studio looked to Peggy Guggenheim and the long tradition of women patrons who collected art, beauty and life with equal appetite, imagining a cast of women moving through the hazy hours between night and morning. They are the ones running late from work with the previous night still clinging to them, watching the sunrise after staying out until dawn, losing their friends somewhere along the way, falling in love, still dancing or already thinking about tomorrow. They are messy, wild and free, refusing to move through life in straight lines.

That spirit came through in clothes that felt just as layered and contradictory. Handmade Bandhani skirts from the dunes of Kutch were gathered beneath clouds of sheer, beaded organza, while handwoven Chanderi silk from the Narmada met Eri silk hand-knitted in the Himalayas and dyed with plants foraged from the landscape. Techniques, textures and traditions collided, creating pieces that revealed something different with every layer. There was an excess to the clothes, but also something deeply tender, as if each piece carried a little of the landscape and the hands that made it.

Gundi Studio’s approach to craft is rooted in the idea that clothing can carry stories across generations. Every stitch holds the memory of its maker and the place it came from, while the women wearing the clothes give them another life. These are clothes for work and parties, love affairs and long nights, exhaustion and exhilaration. Photographer Rita Castel-Branco takes us backstage in this Vein exclusive!