Textiles have always been the quiet heartbeat of EKA. Founded by designer Rina Singh in 2011, the label begins every collection not with a sketch but with a fabric—letting texture, craft, and memory direct the design long before any trend enters the conversation. The Autumn/Winter 2025 collection stays true to this instinct, drawing inspiration from the delicate, double-sided Chamba Rumal embroidery of Himachal Pradesh.
“I’ve always been drawn to the unfinished and the raw,” Singh says. “When I discovered an incomplete Chamba Rumal in Ahmedabad, it felt like a quiet conversation across time. The piece had visible pencil marks and half-done floral motifs. Funnily, the dealer asked me, ‘Why are you buying this?’ But I found it so beautiful that I had to buy it.”
India’s textile heritage is vast—a tapestry woven across remote craft villages, temple towns, and hidden artistic enclaves. These fabrics carry the weight of generations, and for EKA, they have always been an inexhaustible well of inspiration. Yet Singh’s reverence for heritage arrives with a distinctly modern gaze. Even with Chamba Rumals—traditionally executed in satin stitch with resham threads, where the front and back mirror each other in beauty—she resisted the urge to replicate. Instead, she translated their spirit into woven motifs, embroidered flourishes, and layered textures that honour tradition without becoming bound to it.
“What I wanted was a collection that references tradition without feeling weighed down by it,” she explains. “I didn’t want to make a literal, craft-heavy collection that overwhelms the wearer. When you burden a garment with the full weight of craft, it becomes an artifact, rather than something alive. Our aim was to let the textiles speak, while remaining wearable and contemporary.”
The A/W 2025 line breathes this idea into form—button-down merino jackets, silk outerwear, collared shirts with pants, double-breasted jackets, high-waist maxi skirts paired with relaxed tops, and whisper-light organza dresses layered with winter jackets carrying reimagined Chamba motifs. Volume and layering become a kind of language; texture becomes emotion. Muted winter tones play against earthy browns, punctuated by sudden flashes of cobalt blue, red, purple, and sun-bright yellow—like sparks in a quiet landscape.
The campaign, shot in Dasa village near Chamba, feels like a homecoming of sorts. “It felt fitting to bring these pieces back to the land of their origin, but through the lens of a contemporary woman,” Singh says. “She is someone who honours the past while making it her own.”
EKA’s newly opened store in Gurugram’s Ireo Grand View High Street—co-created with Amoeba Design—extends this philosophy into space. With womenswear, menswear, home textiles, accessories, and the Rare Collection jewellery line, the store behaves less like a retail space and more like a gentle whisper. “We didn’t want a typical retail environment,” Singh says. “It needed to transcend commerce and become an act of storytelling, like a museum of emotions.”
For Singh, sustainability is a way of working. “Our work celebrates the time spent on each piece—dyed, embroidered, and crafted by hand. There’s an intimacy in textiles that carry the pulse of craft villages. That is the soul of EKA.” And this season, that soul feels beautifully alive—unfinished yet intentional, steeped in history yet unmistakably modern. A collection that doesn’t merely adorn the body but invites the wearer to inhabit a world where heritage and imagination continue stitching themselves together, one quiet thread at a time.