Introducing Mukur : A Story of Craft, Courage, & Reinvention
- Sumana Mukherjee
- Oct 2
- 3 min read
Mukur is a boutique of stories stitched with courage, reinvention, and the timeless artistry of India. At its soul is a 61-year-old woman: a daughter, a sister, and a fearless single mother whose journey has been shaped by struggles, quiet joys, and an unyielding spirit to move forward. Her belief that it’s never too late to follow your dreams gave birth to Mukur, a label where every creation carries the warmth of her resilience.
The slow fashion thing here is less about making a statement and more about admitting how design actually works when you're doing it right, which is to say it takes however long it takes and rushing it just means you end up with something half-resolved that bugs you every time you look at it.
Working with Indian handlooms, hand embroidery and traditional prints means you're dealing with techniques that have opinions about how they want to be used, materials that tell you pretty quickly when you're trying to force them into something they're not built for, aesthetic possibilities that only show up when you've spent enough hours with your hands in it to stop imposing and start listening. Getting fluent with craft happens either over decades or through the kind of obsessive deep dive where you forget to eat lunch because you're trying to understand why one weave structure drapes completely differently from another, but either way it requires actually showing up to the materials repeatedly and paying attention to what they're telling you. The Bengali influences running through these collections come from genuine familiarity with how the regional aesthetic actually operates, taking those specific ideas about colour relationships and pattern density and folkloric imagery and translating them into clothes that work for how people actually live now while keeping the conversation with tradition alive and honest.
Design writing loves to put everyone in boxes about when they started and what generation they belong to and whether they're emerging or established, as if any of that tells you anything useful about whether the work is good, when really the only thing that matters is whether someone has figured out how to translate what they see into something other people can wear and feel something about. What gets interesting is watching how someone's accumulated experience shows up in their design decisions, how all those years of noticing things create a different kind of confidence in aesthetic choices, how keeping at the work through the genuinely difficult parts produces collections that feel more thought-through than the stuff that gets abandoned the second it stops being fun. Mukur's approach to colour moves between these really restrained Earth tones and then suddenly these vibrant prints because the designer gets how contrast works as more than just a visual trick, how you can use it to let a garment hold multiple moods at once, how collections get deeper when they make space for the fact that people are complicated and their clothes can reflect that instead of flattening everything into one consistent vibe. This kind of design thinking comes from years of watching how visual elements actually interact in practice, how you can layer meaning into aesthetic choices without making it feel heavy-handed or like you're trying too hard to be profound about fashion.
