What HUEMN and R|Elan Are Bringing to Lakmē Fashion Week This Season
Since its launch in 2012, HUEMN has built its identity around a simple but compelling idea: clothing can be more than something we wear; it can be a reflection of the world we inhabit. Over the years, the label has developed a visual language that is at once raw and refined, drawing from the tensions that exist around us — between the familiar and the unexpected, destruction and creation, street culture and tailoring, masculinity and femininity. For Pranav Kirti, Co-founder of HUEMN, this tension has always been central to the brand’s creative process. “Our design journey has been an unapologetic exploration of contrasts, where the rawness of destruction meets the elegance of creation,” he says.
From the beginning, Kirti was drawn towards minimalism, gender-fluid dressing and a particular interpretation of luxe athleisure, gradually shaping a vocabulary that felt distinctly HUEMN. But beneath the pared-back silhouettes and experimental proportions was always something more restless: a desire to question what fashion was expected to look like. “Creatively, we’ve always strived to ‘disrupt’ the norm,” he says. “It’s a clichéd word and still it’s relatively relevant for us. Society and the world around us has always played a huge role in being the source of inspiration for our work.”
That instinct to look beyond fashion itself has remained one of the label’s defining characteristics. Rather than treating each season as an isolated collection, HUEMN has approached clothing as a continuing conversation with culture — responding to what is happening around it, sometimes directly and sometimes through abstraction. It is perhaps why the label’s runway appearances have never followed a conventional fashion calendar.
This season, HUEMN returns to the runway at Lakmé Fashion Week x FDCI through a special collaboration with R|Elan™, the fabric brand from Reliance Industries Limited. The partnership brings together HUEMN’s experimentation with R|Elan’s focus on material innovation, resulting in a collection that approaches athleisure through a more elevated, fashion-forward lens.
For Kirti, however, the runway itself is never the point. HUEMN shows when it has something to say. “Seasons have never really concerned us,” he says. “If there is nothing to say, I’d rather stay in the studio and keep working.” It is a philosophy that has allowed the label to resist the pressure of constant visibility, making its runway moments feel more like statements than seasonal obligations. Culture and storytelling, rather than trends, have always been the driving force.
The latest collaboration continues that conversation. At its heart is HUEMN’s familiar juxtaposition of beauty and destruction, with archival craft techniques reframed through the possibilities of contemporary textile technology. “In partnership with R|Elan, this collection reimagines athleisure by merging it with elevated dressing, utilising their performance-led fabrics — such as Kooltex, Eco Gold and Green Gold,” says Kirti.
The result is a collection where the familiar codes of sportswear are deliberately pushed into more unexpected territory. An oxblood denim jacket is punctuated with intricate Chikankari embroidery, crafted using R|Elan’s Eco Gold fabric, bringing together the visual richness of traditional craft with the functionality of a contemporary textile. Elsewhere, you can find HUEMN’s snakeskin print, while a draped garment internally referred to as the “mummy top” is constructed from R|Elan’s Kooltex fabric. Highly functional cargo trousers made from R|Elan’s EvaSoft fabric complete the vocabulary, balancing utility with the label’s more sculptural approach to dressing.
It is this ability to make opposites coexist that has become integral to HUEMN. Looking back, Kirti traces the beginnings of this instinct to experiment to a garment created even before HUEMN officially existed: a special teal-blue Anarkali made by the duo. “That was our real beginning,” he recalls. It was an early indication of the creative path they would eventually take — one that was willing to place seemingly unrelated ideas next to one another and see what happened.
In the early years, HUEMN was experimenting with styling and proportions at a time when the market was not necessarily ready for the combinations the brand was proposing. “We have always been risk takers,” Kirti says. “We put sneakers on the runway at a time when nobody paired clothes like that, and the market wasn’t ready for it. We had to create our audience and educate it. That rawness is still there; however, today it’s more confident.”
But what does it actually mean to be distinctly HUEMN?
The answer, unsurprisingly, lies in contrast. Even the name plays with the relationship between colour and identity: hue speaks to colour, while HUEMN means human. For Kirti, the brand has always been interested in what makes people different from one another rather than what makes them conform. “From day one I believed in personalities over models, in role models over models,” he says.
He describes HUEMN as a space where opposites are allowed to exist simultaneously — “beauty and terror, the street and tailoring, the poetic and the political. A HUEMN piece comes alive only when someone wears it and brings their own story into it,” he says.
Perhaps that is also why authenticity has become increasingly important to the label. In an industry where references travel at extraordinary speed, originality is no longer simply about finding something nobody else has seen. It is about knowing which parts of the outside world to absorb and which to leave behind.
“Everyone is looking at the same references, the same reels, the same moodboards, and you start designing for the world’s approval without realising it,” Kirti says. The answer, for him, has been to look inward. “The conscious effort now is to keep looking inward. To put more of myself, where I come from, what I’ve lived, what I’m reading, into the work, without worrying whether it fits a formula.”
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