Karu Research

Karu Research was founded in 2018 in New Delhi by Indian designer Kartik Kumra as a contemporary luxury menswear brand specifically focused on what Kumra described as 'a deliberately-Indian craft-anchored luxury menswear vocabulary anchored to traditional Indian textile-and-block-printing craft and contemporary fashion-week-aesthetic positioning.' The brand has been one of the defining post-2018 Indian-anchored contemporary-luxury-menswear brands. The Karu Research vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: hand-block-printed silk and cotton shirts with deliberately-traditional-Indian-textile-pattern motif references, deconstructed Italian-mill wool tailored separates with hand-finished Indian-craft detailing, hand-embroidered cotton-and-linen ready-to-wear with traditional Indian-craft construction references, deliberately-architectural cotton-and-linen tailored separates, and a colour palette anchored to natural-indigo, washed-cream, oxblood, ecru, washed-charcoal, plus the brand's recurring use of traditional-Indian-dye saturated red, saffron-yellow, and the iconic Indian-craft aesthetic colour combinations. The brand is independent and held by Kumra. Karu Research operates with no permanent retail of its own, distributing through SSENSE, MR PORTER, MATCHES, Dover Street Market, GR8, Lane Crawford, the Boontheshop network in Seoul, and a curated set of contemporary-luxury-menswear specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the more conceptually rigorous post-2018 Indian-heritage NYC-and-London-fashion-week-aesthetic-anchored 'cross-cultural-luxury-fashion' brands, with the deliberately-traditional-Indian-craft positioning specifically anchoring the brand inside the contemporary 'cross-cultural-luxury-fashion' conversation that has been continuously rewritten since 2020.