From spring to summer, the sun bleaches what it finds on the streets, in the buildings, and in the desert of Rajasthan’s Thar, leaving behind on its heat-licked surfaces traces of faded colour like a permanent mark. Here and there, on its red walls, the sandstone turns a worn-out pink, the blue sky above seems stunned white from heat and the wind rifles through the sand. There is a beauty in this desiccation, and Rina Singh of Eka knew what to do with it.
As with every Eka collection, the starting point is travel. Eka’s previous collections have drawn from Amer, Landour, Kohima, Goa, Chamba. For Eka Summer 2026, the collection—the palette moves between sand, lime, faded pinks, haldi yellows, and washed blues—has been inspired by Samdar Leher for which the desert becomes both landscape and textile. “Samdar leher is a colour combination of a leheria technique that's normally worn by the Rajasthani woman at the onset of spring. We used the colours and the sensibility of how the colour is composed, the diagonal stripes, and the rest, and built a collection out of that,” she says.
This season, the collection is developed using handwoven cotton Kota from Rajasthan and cotton silk from Bengal, chosen for their lightness, transparency, and ability to hold soft colour. Many of the textiles are block printed as collages, with as many as 120 hand blocks—motifs drawn from desert plants and objects found in the desert landscape. A conversation with Singh on the collection:
How did you render the landscape of the region?
You see the rendering of the dunes in the chevron stripes. It’s basically an interpretation. The collection, in fact, has camos [camouflages] of various objects and flora and fauna seen in the everyday life of the desert – from a peacock to a cacti to a kettle to the desert shrub.
The desert is a space where people travel on foot or on camel-back against a huge and solid expanse of sand. But there is also a stoppage in the afternoons, of finding water suddenly. We incorporated these moods and colours in our campaign which is why you see that oasis of water and that lone tree in it.
The desert is not just one colour so the mood board also has the colours in between and they are very pleasant. It's literally the onset of spring. So when you go to stores and you ask for Samdar Leher, they show you Samdar Leher.
Why are Eka garments always voluminous?
We are a textile-led brand. India is known for its cotton and our cotton is very light-weight, and these light-weight textiles don't render themselves well with heavily stitched, structured clothes. I love working with all hand-woven Indian textiles that are natural, and I don't try to fashion it too much. Eka’s clothes are meant to be away from the body.
There’s a recurrence of light blue blocks with yellow, white, green and pink —we see these in many of your collections. Are they your happy colours?
These are English colours, non-saturated colours, evolved colours. I am a Rajput girl, and much as I don’t want to declare it as a family aesthetic, the fact is, in our family, there’s a huge influence of the West. In a way, I would say these are also very William Morrison colours, which is, somewhere in my mind, the reference when I come back to colours.
You keep coming back to certain colors that you kind of enjoy working with. These colours just belong to the setting, you know. Jaipur, for example, is all pink, but it’s a delicate, regal pink. And these clothes could well be in Maharani Gayatri Devi’s evolved wardrobe if she lived in today's times. Or that is how I would like to imagine it.
Block prints are your unchanging design language. What keeps you committed to it?
Over the years, I've been able to render it differently from all the generations before me, so I feel I am adding intrinsic value to a craft. For the longest time, people looked at block print a a motif language from India.
You have to be really invested in a craft, season after season, working with the same craftsmen and facing the challenges that they face. Otherwise, you can just walk away as a designer saying that, ‘okay, it sold until two seasons ago, it's not selling anymore, so I'll do something different’. That's not how you can call yourself a sustainable fashion label. I work with the same block makers and the same weavers, and it's not possible in fashion to really continue to do the same thing over and over again, unless you're able to direct the language differently.