Gaurav Jai Gupta's Akaaro And Save The Loom Launch V:next, A New Platform For India's Next Design Generation

Gaurav Jai Gupta built Akaaro in 2010 on the idea that handloom was a material to be interrogated rather than preserved, a conviction that eventually made him the only Indian designer to appear solo on the cover of India Today. This week, the brand turns its attention outward, launching V:next in partnership with Save The Loom, the nonprofit Ramesh Menon founded in the aftermath of the 2018 Kerala floods, which went on to restore 273 handlooms destroyed in the disaster in just 100 days, entirely without government funding. Running from September 30 to October 4 at Akaaro's Mumbai space, V:next's debut edition spotlights five design practices from across the country: CRCLE, LeelaLer, mouli, Paiwand and Salooka.

Why Now

Gupta traces the platform's timing to a shift already underway in Indian design, a growing confidence among younger practitioners to question what the category is even supposed to look like. "There is a growing confidence within Indian design today," he says. "Designers are engaging with material, craft, technology and identity in new ways, while also questioning established ideas of what Indian design can look and feel like." The five names chosen for V:next's first edition reflect that energy, in his view, distinct from each other in approach but united by a certain restlessness. "They are distinct in their approaches, but share a sense of curiosity and a willingness to build something of their own."

The idea itself grew out of a shared instinct between Akaaro and Save The Loom rather than a single founding moment, both organisations having spent years embedded in craft, material and the communities behind making. "V:next grew from a shared desire between Akaaro and Save The Loom to look forward and recognise the practices that are quietly shaping the future of Indian design," Gupta says.

What Made The Cut

Selecting five brands out of a country's worth of emerging practices came down to one criterion above all else: a clear point of view. "The brands needed to have a clear sense of identity, to be able to articulate something personal through their materials, processes and design language," Gupta says. Beyond that, he and his collaborators at Save The Loom were looking for a specific kind of thoughtfulness, an engagement with making itself, an awareness of material, and the willingness to experiment without losing track of purpose. The goal was never a cohesive aesthetic across five brands, but five genuinely different ways of thinking about what contemporary Indian design can be. "It wasn't about finding five brands that represented one particular aesthetic, but rather five different ways of thinking about contemporary design and making."

The five names on the roster bear that out. CRCLE, a Chennai-based menswear studio, rethinks everyday tailoring through unstructured cuts and utilitarian detailing. LeelaLer builds entirely compostable clothing, down to the dyes and stitching thread, from rain-fed, organically grown indigenous cotton. Mouli works in a quieter register, hand-embroidered textile objects built to age and fray into their own character over time. Paiwand, founded by Ashita Singhal in 2018, turns discarded textile waste into new woven fabric, a practice that has already earned it an Elle Decor International Design Award. And Salooka builds its handcrafted, woven pieces around restorative storytelling, leaning on rare indigenous processes and techniques rather than standard silhouettes.

A Platform, Not Just A Showcase

For Gupta, V:next's ambition extends past a single week of programming at Ballard Estate. "I see V:next as a platform for conversation as much as a showcase," he says, framing the collaboration with Save The Loom as an attempt to give emerging practices both visibility and context, placing them in dialogue with a much longer history of Indian craft rather than presenting them in isolation. That instinct runs through how he talks about heritage more broadly, not as something to be defended unchanged, but as a living system built to keep evolving. "The next chapter of Indian design isn't about moving away from heritage, it is about allowing it to evolve, be questioned and find new relevance."

Bringing five unfamiliar names into a space he has spent fifteen years building his own design language inside of is, by his account, entirely deliberate. "Akaaro has always been a space where we try to create connections between objects, makers and ideas," he says. "Bringing these emerging practices into the space, through our collaboration with Save The Loom, feels like a natural extension of that." The point was never simply to place new work next to old work for contrast, but to see what happens when different generations of making genuinely share a room. "That exchange is what makes V:next meaningful to us."

Years of working directly with craft and textile communities through Save The Loom have shaped how Gupta hopes the next generation will handle the inheritance they've been given: heritage treated as something alive rather than fixed in place, evolving the way it always has in response to new materials, economies and cultural influence, with today's designers simply continuing that evolution rather than freezing it. That evolution, he stresses, cannot come at the cost of the people behind it. "Craft cannot be reduced simply to an aesthetic or a material; there are people, histories and livelihoods embedded within it." The most exciting outcome he can imagine is heritage treated as a starting point rather than a constraint, something the next generation can reinterpret and challenge without losing the knowledge built into it in the first place.

V:next runs from 5 to 8:30 pm daily, September 30 through October 4, at Akaaro, Ballard Estate, Mumbai.