On September 21, 2026, New Delhi-based fashion label Lovebirds Studio made their debut at London Fashion Week (LFW), presenting their Spring-Summer 2027 collection titled “India: IYKYK.” Co-founded by husband-wife duo and designers Gursi Singh and Amrita Khanna in 2014, Lovebirds Studio has been known for its restraint and precision, simultaneously blending the demands of neat functionality with the fluidity of a certain sense of playfulness and joy.
For their SS27 collection, the designers took a different turn while staying true to their essence, this time returning to the visual world of India before the internet. The collection evoked a very specific graphic language of our childhood years—from the instantly recognisable ‘Adarsh Balak’ (‘Ideal Boy’) posters and Hindi school charts that donned our classroom walls, to hand-painted shop signs, matchboxes, postal stamps, and overly vibrant photo-studio backdrops.
At their Lindley Hall presentation in London, these translated to lower waistlines, boxy jackets, deconstructed chintz motif on denim, belts everywhere but the waist, pleated skirts with imagery from 1970s posters, kitten-heeled blue and white hawai chappal with a black thread at the ankle to ward off nazar (evil eye) and more.
To celebrate their LFW debut, Robb Report India sat down with designers Amrita Khanna and Gursi Singh to uncover the making of the collection and what it means to take one’s work to one of fashion’s most coveted global stages.
Amrita Khanna and Gursi Singh (AK & GS): It wasn’t really a conscious decision to go back. We realised we were thinking about a version of India that existed before everything became so instantly visible and shareable. There were these everyday visual references that were so familiar to us that we had stopped noticing them—the studio backdrop, the ‘Ideal Boy’ poster, hand-painted Bollywood signs, the visual chaos of the streets. They weren’t designed to represent India; they were simply part of the India we grew up in. As designers, we became interested in looking at those things again, not with nostalgia, but with a fresh set of eyes. There is something very specific about references that you don’t need to explain to someone who grew up around them, you just know them.
AK & GS: It feels more like a continuation, but with a different lens. The restraint, functionality and precision that have always been part of Lovebirds are still very much there. What has changed is what we are applying that language to. In some ways, it is a homecoming because we are looking more directly at things that have always surrounded us, but we are not trying to recreate them. We are taking those references and putting them through the visual language we have built over the last decade. For us, it feels like another chapter rather than a departure.
AK & GS: After almost a decade of building Lovebirds in India, we wanted our first London presentation to communicate what the brand actually is, rather than create a collection specifically for an international audience. SS27 felt honest to that. It carries the discipline and restraint we have always worked with, but looks at Indian visual culture and craft through our contemporary lens.
AK & GS: The silhouettes remain considered but there is a deliberate tension—elongated proportions and easy volumes and pieces that move around the body without feeling overly constructed.There is also an element of disruption in the way familiar shapes and surfaces are treated. Rather than relying on exaggerated silhouettes, we wanted the interest to come through proportion, layering, texture and the way the fabrics behave on the body.
AK & GS: At the centre of the collection is chintz, a cloth with a long history of leaving India and coming back altered. For SS27, we worked with block-printing artisans to rework, disrupt, and re-layer classic chintz blocks, then trained artisans to brush over the printed cloth by hand. The brushwork breaks the repeat, thins some passages and floods others, leaving the chintz to read as something to wear now. The idea was never to make chintz look less Indian. It was to make it feel less fixed, and allow it to become something that belongs to the present.
AK & GS: The postcard, and its fashion equivalent: heavy embroidery, maximalism, the bridal lehenga as the whole story. That India exists and is beautifully made, but it has been seen plenty. There is also room for modern, contemporary clothing coming out of India, and room to play with Indian techniques and textiles, to break a chintz block or fray a brocade, and make clothes for anyone, anywhere.
AK & GS: Definitely the everyday things that don't necessarily get described as “Indian design” but are deeply embedded in our visual memory. The ‘Ideal Boy’ poster is one example, the studio backdrop is another. The hand-painted Bollywood poster, the exaggerated signage, the visual density of Indian streets—these things have their own design language. They are part of how we understand our surroundings. And then there is craft, which we wanted to approach through the process rather than simply through its finished appearance. Working with block-printing artisans and incorporating chintz alongside working with weavers in Banaras and Kutch allowed us to take those traditions and make something new from them.
AK & GS: That Lovebirds has always been global and Indian at once. We have worked inwards while growing outwards. And that India holds far more than one look. The collection speaks to two audiences in the same room: someone who grew up in India will know every reference by instinct. Whereas someone elsewhere in the world might sense a story in a pair of printed hands or a black thread at the ankle—both readings belong to the clothes.