Earlier this week, Kartik Kumra, the founder and designer of Kartik Research, was steaming a patterned shirt in the back of his new store on New York City’s Orchard St. Kumra rubbed sleep from his eyes. The bespectacled 25-year-old is based in New Delhi, where he constantly corresponds with the network of independent craftspeople who make the brand’s homespun-fabric trousers and richly embroidered jackets. Given the time difference, he had 120 WhatsApp messages waiting for him by dawn. “The first few hours of my day are hell,” he joked.
The frenetic pace of his morning speaks to just how quickly Kartik Research flies off store shelves. In August 2022, Kumra held his first popup just down the block at Colbo, a men’s boutique with a coffee bar and rails of garments made from understated artisanal fabrics. Kumra’s embroidered button-ups and flaxen-y linen pants, all made by hand in India, fit right in—though he wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Kumra founded Kartik Research (then called Karu Research) in 2020 as a Penn sophomore looking for a side project during pandemic Zoom classes. When it started catching on with international retailers, he turned it into his full-time hustle, staying in India and expanding his network of hand-weavers and embroiderers.
The Colbo pop-up was the first time Kumra had ever seen his brand’s goods in a physical store. Not that they were there for long. “There was a line outside in the morning,” Kumra recalled with a smile. “In the first hour we did, like, eight grand in sales, and this was when we only had 1,800 followers on Instagram. I was like, Ok, people like the clothes.”
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Kartik Research represents a modern menswear paradox: right now, the brands with the most hype are the ones that chase it the least. The numbers behind Kartik Research don’t lie. In 2025, Kumra estimates that the company will clear $3 million in revenue, a trajectory of 80 per cent year-over-year growth fueled by booming sales at some of the best fashion stores in the world: Selfridges in London, Dover Street Market in Paris and Tokyo, Boon The Shop in Seoul, and Up There in Melbourne. In 2023, he was a semifinalist for the prestigious LVMH Prize, which earmarks the most promising emerging designers. “I just applied through the online portal,” Kumra said with a shrug. “I was like, Oh shit. I was two months out of college at that point.”
In many ways, Kartik Research still feels like the scrappy outfit that Kumra ran from his dorm room while finishing up his economics degree. Though now the brand has more followers, social media is still not Kumra’s game, nor is celebrity, another pillar of contemporary brand building. (The likes of Paul Mescal and Steph Curry have worn Kartik before, but you’re more likely to see it at LES boîte Le Dive than LA celeb haunt Giorgio Baldi.)
Kumra himself doesn’t seem particularly interested in the schmoozier parts of the modern designer lifestyle. He’s a clothing geek who made his first money in the biz as a Supreme reseller, and who idolizes Dries Van Noten, the legendary Belgian designer who incorporated Indian craft into his collections for decades. When he was building the brand, he posted regular updates to the “Throwing Fits” Discord channel, and still runs in menswear-mania circles. One of his long-term goals, he noted, is for Kartik Research to make it into The Archivist, the heady Parisian designer vintage store. “That would be sick,” he said.
In the shop, I could already picture some of the clothes on a decisively curated vintage rack decades down the line. I was drawn to a handsome linen blazer bisected by chains of floral embroidery, as well as pleated trousers with colorful hand-beaded waistbands that would be a crime to cover with a belt. Every piece is made by hand, even those that look deceivingly simple, like a boxy white button-up shirt made of a delightful puckered check fabric. “This took weeks to make,” Kumra noted.
As Kartik Research has grown, Kumra has taken pains to dial in these subtle details. He now works with some 50 different artisan groups throughout India—hence the volume of WhatsApps—and is building his own vertically-integrated atelier in New Delhi so he can keep a close eye on product development. Added Kumra, “I think if you’re supporting craft, then you have to support craftspeople.”
His care for the process is evident in the newest collections, which represent a leap forward even from the popup days, when the brand caught fire thanks to its simple shirts, pants, and jackets embellished with graphic details—the kinds of garments that are easy to wear and designed to accentuate one’s menswear IQ. “When I started the brand, it was like, what can I produce while I’m sitting in a dorm room?” Kumra said. “But the aspiration was always to do something a little bit more ambitious.”
Now, Kartik Research is headed in a direction all its own. If his early work felt more like catnip for dudes on TikTok sharing personal style tips, the fall-winter 2025 collection is an unmistakable evolution, with slubby white suit jackets, shiny capri-length silk trousers, linen military jackets, and explosions of beautifully understated prints and patterns that frames the beauty of Indian craft in a totally elegant modern perspective. “It’s a new aesthetic using old techniques,” Kumra said, adding that he’s been taking design cues from Indian modernism, an art movement that sought to define a distinct national aesthetic. “It’s about moving to something a bit more original.”
In June, Kumra is planning to put an exclamation mark on his breakthrough with a Paris Fashion Week runway show. If all goes well, Kartik Research will join a small number of independent menswear brands (including Bode, Kiko Kostadinov, and Auralee) that have carved out a place of their own in the international fashion establishment. As we’re talking in the shop, Kumra can’t help but show me a sneak preview of what’s next. “I don’t care,” he said as he grabbed his phone. The idea of the next collection, he explained, is rooted in “instinctive elegance.” He pulled up a photo of a gentleman he met while traveling in Gujarat from one of his WhatsApp threads, a photo destined for countless moodboards if it ever gets out there: in a stroke of organic sartorial genius, the man had attached the length of an antique silver necklace to the placket of his worn-out workshirt. Evidently, he buttoned his shirt using the studs on the necklace.
“It’s crazy, right!” Kumra exclaimed. He showed me the forthcoming Kartik Research version, a respectfully faithful recreation of the original. “And it’s instinctive, because it’s not for social media,” Kumra added. “This guy doesn’t have a TikTok, so it’s just like, this feels right to him.”
Via gq.com
