At a time when the line between cultural appropriation and appreciation has never been more contested, I found myself in Aizawl, Mizoram — watching a culture being told entirely by its own people.
The North-East has always existed in the Indian imagination as something vivid and a little out of reach: its textiles, its landscapes, its way of life picked up in passing, rarely sat with. Most of us have encountered the Mizo Puanchei at some point — the wraparound skirt, known simply as Puan, hand-woven by Mizo women in over thirty distinct varieties. Each tribe has its own version, differentiated by motifs and stripes that carry specific cultural meaning. A plain Puan takes two days to complete. The ones with complex motifs can take over a month. It is also, traditionally, a central piece of a woman’s wedding trousseau — functional, ceremonial, and quietly irreplaceable.
What I witnessed in Aizawl earlier this month was built on exactly that kind of depth.
The Zoram Fashion Showcase transformed the venue into something that felt less like a fashion set and more like stepping into a landscape. The curator, Lal Moya, had filled the place with locally sourced plants and greenery, floor to ceiling. It smelled like a forest. The choice to work entirely with local materials wasn’t incidental.
The crowd arrived dressed beautifully and with obvious intention, there was an energy in the room that I don’t encounter very often. The kind that exists when everyone present quietly understands they are seeing something for the first time.
Three designers showed that evening. Hannah Khiangte, Lapâr, and Escape Engmoia — each rooted in the same cultural soil, each having grown somewhere distinct.
Lapâr’s ‘Bride of Christ’ collection was the one I kept returning to. Patricia Zadeng built each piece on indigenous weaving structures from the backstrap loin loom, then brought in handwoven three-dimensional florals, crochet, embroidery, tassels, checks. Zadeng reviving traditional Mizo motifs that had quietly disappeared from the market and reintroducing them through a contemporary lens. The collection reflected what she describes as the spiritual journey of the Mizo people.
Escape Engmoia’s collection felt effortlessly edgy — mixing elemnts of nature and contemporary silhouettes. “When you live here, nature is always around you,” he said. “The hills, the flowers, the greenery. I wanted that spirit to come through.” And it did — in fluid silhouettes in yellows, greens, blues, and beige, in cross-stitch flower embroidery that felt less like a design choice and more like something the landscape had pressed into the fabric itself. The handloom traditions of Mizoram ran through every look.
Hannah Khiangte closed the evening with her collection ‘Lungleng’, a concept that resists direct translation: “Khawntlang Lunglen”, the Mizo feeling of remembering something deeply without being able to name what, exactly, you are remembering. A nostalgia with no fixed address. “It lives in our songs, our poetry, and in the way we think about the past,” she said. The clothes reflected the feeling loud and clear. Burning oranges, warm yellows, deep blues that called to mind the sky over Aizawl just before dark. Mizo patterns cut through modern silhouettes, layered and alive, with rose appliqués recurring throughout like a quiet signature. The corsetry was assured. The styling left nothing to chance. There was nothing tentative about any of it.
The styling was the work of James Lalthanzuala who has long been one of the more interesting eyes working in Indian fashion. His fingerprints were all over the collection’s precision: the mixing of textures, the structural confidence, the way each look came together.
It’s worth saying plainly: Mizo designers have been making remarkable work for years. The breakthroughs have been individual, hard-won, and scattered. What the Aizawl Design Project is attempting — quietly, and with obvious seriousness — is to change the underlying condition. To build the platform so the next generation doesn’t have to find their own way through a door that was never really left open for them.
What started on the 10th of March in a forest-filled arena in Aizawl feels, in retrospect, less like a debut and more like an arrival. The talent was never the question. It was always the platform. And now, finally, there’s one — built from within, rooted in the land, and entirely on its own terms.
