Milan Fashion Week: Indian Designers and Cricket-Fashion Crossover Make Global Mark

Indian designers secured a prominent presence at Milan Fashion Week this September, with Dhruv Kapoor unveiling his Spring/Summer 2027 collection alongside a landmark partnership between PUMA, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, and the designer. The Economic Times reported that September has become a defining month for Indian fashion internationally, with labels debuting across New York, London, Milan, and Paris. These developments mark a maturing moment for the Indian fashion industry's sustained push onto the global runway circuit.

🎬 Indian Fashion Claims Air Miles at the World's Biggest Fashion Weeks

Indian fashion designers have been staking their claim on the world's major fashion calendars with a run that spanned four global cities this September. According to the Economic Times, the month has become an unofficial showcase for Indian creative talent, with labels accumulating air miles across New York, London, Milan, and Paris. The week began with the London debut of Lovebirds, a contemporary label by Gursi Singh and Amrita Khanna, whose collection wove chintz fabrics with Adarsh Balak graphics into a presentation that drew attention from international buyers and the press. Two days later, designer Dhruv Kapoor returned to Milan Fashion Week, continuing what has become a recurring Italian presence for Indian fashion. The Economic Times noted that these international appearances help Indian designers build visibility with global buyers and establish themselves within the competitive structure of the fashion industry calendar. Rather than one-off debuts, the participation signals a more systematic effort by Indian fashion houses to treat global runways as regular platforms rather than aspirational milestones. The broader pattern, with designers from India appearing on multiple major calendars in a single month, reflects an industry that has moved from occasional international forays to a more organized and confident global engagement. [1]

🎬 PUMA, RCB, and Dhruv Kapoor Unite Cricket Culture with High Fashion in Milan

Six years of partnership between PUMA and Royal Challengers Bengaluru reached a new pitch at Milan Fashion Week with the unveiling of three statement jackets as part of designer Dhruv Kapoor's Spring/Summer 2027 collection titled Presence. The collaboration placed one of Indian cricket's most commercially vibrant franchises at the center of a high-fashion runway, filtering the visual language of the sport through Kapoor's design sensibility. RCB's commercial strength at the time of the collaboration was considerable: the franchise was valued at USD 269 million, carried more than 22 million Instagram followers and held a 16.2 percent share of engagement among cricket teams on the platform. PUMA's 2026 authentic RCB jersey had by that point recorded a 300 percent year-on-year jump in sales and was reported to be PUMA's top-selling apparel item globally. The Milan debut represented a deliberate move to take an established Indian sporting intellectual property and position it within the global luxury fashion conversation, at a moment when cricket's cultural reach is expanding well beyond its traditional South Asian base. The collection's title, Presence, speaks directly to this ambition: to assert the visibility of Indian sport and Indian design in spaces that have historically belonged to European fashion houses. [2]

Sources: [1] The Economic Times · [2] infashionbusiness.com