Tarun Tahiliani studied economics at Doon School and St. Stephen's College, took an MBA at Wharton, and returned to Bombay in 1984 to work in advertising. In 1987, with his wife Sailaja "Sal" Tahiliani, he opened Ensemble, the first multi-designer luxury boutique in India, on the Lion Gate in Colaba. The store showed Rohit Khosla, J.J. Valaya, Rohit Bal, Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla alongside Tahiliani's own nascent label.

The Late Entry

Tahiliani himself did not formally train in design until 1990, when he enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. He returned in 1992 and launched his eponymous label at thirty. The delayed entry — unusual among his contemporaries — meant that he thought about the Indian wardrobe with a marketer's attention as much as a designer's.

The Concept Sari

Tahiliani's most-repeated technical contribution is the concept sari, introduced in 2001: a sari pre-stitched and pleated into a fishtail-skirt silhouette, worn with an attached drape. The innovation addresses the single most-cited disadvantage of the sari — the time and skill required to drape it — by pre-solving the drape in production. Every major Indian designer from Manish Malhotra to Anita Dongre now produces variants.

“

Indian fashion will become international when it is wearable. The sari is a masterpiece. The sari that cannot be worn, however, is only a masterpiece. — Tarun Tahiliani, 2011

The Couture Business

The Tarun Tahiliani Couture Exposition, held annually in Delhi since 2007, is one of the defining events of the Indian bridal fashion calendar. The label operates ten retail stores across India, a diffusion line (Tasva), and a menswear line.

The Critical Argument

Tahiliani's reputation has, historically, been more divided than Sabyasachi's or Ritu Kumar's. His critics, often in the craft-revivalist camp, argue that the pre-pleated sari undermined traditional sari-draping literacy. His defenders argue that the alternative is not traditional draping but not wearing the sari at all. Both are correct. The sari survives, commercially, in both forms. That both exist is the contemporary condition, and Tahiliani is, at sixty-two, its most articulate advocate.