The IKKIVI Podcast: Exploring Fashion, Culture and Values · Nivi Murthy

S3E7: Fashion Editor-in-Chief, Nonita Kalra on the Evolution of Indian Fashion | Nonita Kalra

·56 min·3 clips

Nonita Kalra says India has “too many fashion schools” and “not enough jobs.”

Fashion starts as feeling. The guest reaches back to a childhood demand for neon green kolhapuris on a drive to Muzaffar Nagar. Her mother was horrified, which somehow makes the memory better. She was stylish too, and encouraging, and clothing became less about looking nice than recognizing something in herself. By 16, the guest had gone all in on black, right down to her bedroom walls. Pink Floyd was everywhere. Clothes gave shape to feelings before the feelings had tidy names. The host gives the story room, and the conversation keeps circling the same live wire: how taste, identity, work, and ordinary life fit inside a creative career. Bobbi Brown comes up as a lesson in slow building, restraint, clear communication, and staying with a brand long enough for it to mean something. Then the tone gets sharper. Asked about fashion education in India, the guest does not pretend it is simple. There are too many schools. Skills matter, but so does life after college, and that part sounds thinner. Graduates step toward titles like stylist, creative director, brand strategist, and fashion director, with too few real places to land. She stays fair to the institutes, while still naming the gap between a protected classroom and the harder world outside it. The ending is warm, almost private. The host leaves with thoughts to sit with, journal through, and feel. The guest answers with the same care, praising the host's research, listening, and passion.

As heard by us

A warm, values-led fashion conversation that moves from childhood taste to Indian fashion's future.

Nonita Kalra treats fashion as a language of selfhood, and that is what gives the conversation its shape. It begins with a childhood memory of neon green kola puris, then moves through the long habit of wearing black, painting a bedroom black, and using fashion to say what words…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want fashion talk that starts with childhood taste and lands in industry reality.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The IKKIVI Podcast: Exploring Fashion, Culture and Values