- 1992 (MCMXCII)
- Living
- British-Indian-Nigerian
- Ahluwalia
- •Vintage-archive reconstruction
- •The Lagos/London/Delhi framework
- •Microsoft Design Award (2023)
- •LVMH Prize finalist (2020)
Priya Ahluwalia
The London-born Indian-Nigerian designer whose eponymous label reconstructs garments from vintage archives — and whose 2019 photo-book *Sweet Lassi* remains a reference for contemporary Indian menswear scholarship.
Priya Ahluwalia was born in 1992 in London, to an Indian father and a Nigerian mother, and raised in Jaipur and London. She studied at the University of Westminster and took an MA in menswear at the London College of Fashion, graduating in 2018. Her final-year collection — reconstructed from vintage garments sourced in a Panipat recycling warehouse in Haryana — was bought by Browns, H. Lorenzo, and Dover Street Market before her graduation show concluded.
The Method
Ahluwalia’s signature practice is vintage reconstruction. She sources deadstock and secondhand garments — from Panipat, from Lagos markets, from London charity shops — and reconstructs them through patchworking, dyeing, and recombination. Her collections are traceable, per garment, to their original provenance. The constraint — that no new fabric is purchased — has held across every collection.
My label is an argument. Every fabric already exists. We are only rearranging it. — Priya Ahluwalia
The Book, and the Recognition
Her 2019 photo-essay book Sweet Lassi, a visual study of Panipat’s secondhand-garment economy, remains one of the most-cited contemporary references for diasporic Indian menswear. She was an LVMH Prize finalist in 2020, a Queen Elizabeth II Award winner in 2022, and a Microsoft Design Award winner in 2023.
