Thanks to Instagram reels, the pace of content consumption has increased. With many influencers hopping onto the GRWM (Get Ready With Me) trend, it is difficult to miss them, as it is to remember them. This is not the case with Nancy Tyagi of Johri Enclave, Northeast Delhi, who makes outfits from scratch.
Tyagi started her journey as a regular content creator, making transition reels, but soon she realised the need for originality in the sea of sameness. Last March, she started a 100-day challenge of creating outfits from scratch, soon becoming the talk of the internet. As she steps into the 80th day of her 100-day challenge today, she is set to create a YouTube series where she will create long-format videos of her design process.
Fashion earnings
The 23-year-old self-taught designer was, however, not always interested in fashion. Originally from Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat district, she moved to Delhi in 2020 to pursue her UPSC dreams. While moving to Delhi felt like the right decision, Tyagi was soon beset with many troubles. Tyagi’s mother, Maya, who used to teach at a primary school in her hometown, lost her job due to the pandemic. Soon it became difficult for them to sustain in the big city, forcing her mother to work in an e-waste factory.
Realising the financial crunch, Tyagi too decided to start earning. Not knowing how to go about it, she turned to social media. She started posting regular fashion transition videos, hoping to reach a large audience and make an earning out of it. Simultaneously, while preparing for the UPSC examination, she continued brainstorming on ways to create content that would stand out amidst the digital noise. From her online content, she now makes `3 lakh a month and she has 671k followers on her Instagram and 820k subscribers on her YouTube channel.
“As a kid, I would design outfits for my Barbie dolls on a sewing machine, but I never had formal training,” says Tyagi. At the age of 21, Tyagi started designing clothes. Her brother, Aahan, 19, documented the process and posted it on Instagram. While it did reach an audience, the response was not always positive. Tyagi was often body-shamed for “being too skinny to carry an outfit”. The reach, too, was not enough to generate income. But that did not discourage her, she continued making those reels and kept getting better at designing. From a mere 400 views on her reels, today her reel of recreating Alia Bhatt’s Red Sea International Film Festival red-carpet look in December has over a million views, with stylist and owner of fashion line Rheson, Rhea Kapoor, and Guneet Monga, producer of Academy-winning documentary The Elephant Whisperers (2022) encouraging her for what she does.
Fulfilling dreams
With recognition, she also got brand collaborations with Google India, Tata CLiQ, Nivea, Dot & Key, Pond’s and many more; this helped her generate income for her family. “I now earn enough to sustain my family and their needs. My mother has been my unwavering support, so I wanted to do something for her. I wanted her to rest and live a better life. Seeing her work hard in a factory, then come back home, tired, broke my heart,” she says.
What goes into creating an outfit? Tyagi says her day starts with mood boarding for an outfit. “It usually begins with something that catches my eye, or a re-creation of a celebrity outfit, like Deepika Padukone’s outfit from the 2019 IIFA Awards.” She then prepares a sketch of the outfit and heads to Seelampur’s Shanti Mohalla market from where she sources the fabric. All these steps are well documented by her brother, who takes care of the technical part of the content creation – editing, lighting, and shooting — while Tyagi selects the songs that she knows will help the reel reach a larger audience.
She also dreams of someday having her own label. “I’ve been dreaming about starting my label. I talk about it with my brother every day. If I ever have my label, I’d want it to carry my name, something like what Manish Malhotra has done,” she says.