After years of dressing men for red carpets, weddings and public moments, Gaurav Gupta has opened his first menswear flagship boutique. The move formalises what has already been happening quietly within the brand. “Our menswear has had a very unique sensibility and voice,” Gupta says. Over time, that category began to feel self-contained. “It’s just made a universe and space of its own.” That universe now has a physical address.
Menswear in India remains largely occasion-driven, a reality Gupta readily acknowledges, listing weddings, cocktail nights and milestone celebrations. But he resists the idea that this framework has ever constrained masculinity. “In India, masculinity has always been quite fluid,” he says. “We have always worn decorations, we have always worn jewels. Our ancestors, our kings, everybody has worn that in all kinds of cultures and all over India. And we’ve all worn drapes.”
That lineage is where his menswear begins, but the execution is futuristic. Sculpted lapels appear with metal accents that seem to drip rather than sit. Anatomical bugle bead embroidery traces the body. Prints are engineered rather than romantic.
“There’s a fantasy parallel world we’ve created for the Gaurav Gupta man,” he says. The brand’s centaur logo, half man and half horse, captures that idea neatly. “He’s living out his fantasy self,” Gupta says. “He’s a bit of a Gatsby boy. He likes to go out. He’s bold, artistic, expressive and breaking free from being defined by what masculinity is supposed to be.”
Curiosity is what allows his menswear to sit outside the familiar binaries of ethnic and Western. Gupta’s work has carved out an entirely new category over the years. “When we started, men were wearing very basic tuxedos. Black, plain. We created the experimental tuxedo.” Embellished, embroidered, metallic, sculpted, those tuxedos gradually expanded into bandhgalas and long jackets, worn as easily by Indian clients as by international ones. “It made Indianness global and globalness Indian,” he says.
