Study the Maison, but do not wear it. Why India’s luxury houses must build an architecture of their own.
The revenue argument is over
For most of the last three decades, the case for Indian luxury rested on potential. That case is closing, because the numbers have arrived.
In FY25, three Indian designer businesses, Sabyasachi, Tarun Tahiliani and Manish Malhotra, together earned roughly ₹1,146 crore. In the same year, the Indian operations of Hermès, Gucci and Dior together earned roughly ₹950 crore. Sabyasachi’s audited revenue has since risen to ₹645 crore in FY26, up about a third in a single year.
The comparison is not like for like. One side counts the Indian subsidiaries of global houses. The other counts the entire businesses of Indian founders. But the direction is not in doubt. On home ground, Indian names are no longer the smaller players.
So the question has changed. It is no longer whether India can build luxury businesses of scale. It is what kind of house those businesses will become.
The temptation: a maison in Indian colours
There is an obvious template, and it is European. A founder whose signature becomes the brand. A Paris or Milan runway to confer legitimacy. A flagship on the right avenue in New York. A monogram, a codified silhouette, and a conglomerate to provide capital once scale arrives.
Every one of those elements works, and every one of them was built for Europe. An Indian house that adopts the full template competes on an architecture its rivals have refined for over a century. It will always be the newer tenant in a building someone else designed. That is a maison in Indian colours: Indian motifs, European structure, and meaning that is still validated elsewhere.
The choice is often framed as Hermès or Gucci. One model is built on family control, artisanal discipline and a scarcity protected over generations. The other has reinvented itself repeatedly through successive creative directors, each one resetting what the name stands for. Both are extraordinary, and both are European answers to European histories. Neither was designed for a country with three thousand living craft traditions and a lineage of makers far older than either house. An Indian house that simply chooses between them has already accepted someone else’s question.
There is a quieter version of the same risk. When an Indian brand goes global by selling control, the meaning tends to travel with the controlling stake. Kama Ayurveda’s growth under Puig’s controlling ownership is a legitimate business outcome. It is also a reminder that global reach and Indian ownership are not the same achievement.
What an own model looks like
This idea did not originate with me alone. Over recent weeks, practitioners, educators and students responding to this newsletter kept arriving at the same conclusion, often in almost the same words. India does not need a copy of the Maison. It needs a house built on its own logic. At the level of principle, four things distinguish that model.
Authorship that outlives the founder. A designer becomes a House the moment the codes survive without the hand that drew them. In Europe that survival came through a founder’s archive. In India it can come through Parampara, the unbroken lineage of named master craftspeople who carry the codes forward. The Shilpi is not a supplier to the house. The Shilpi is part of its authorship.
Scarcity that is real, not engineered. European houses learned to manufacture scarcity through controlled distribution and waiting lists. Indian craft carries scarcity natively, in the hours, the hands and the lineage behind each object. The task is to reveal that scarcity honestly, not to invent it.
Meaning addressed from India. The test is simple and demanding. Does the name need a European runway to be believed? Anita Dongre opened in Beverly Hills under her own name. Tanishq now runs its own stores in the United States. Each of those moves carries an Indian name into a global market without borrowing someone else’s address for its meaning.
Ownership that stays home. Capital decides who owns the meaning in the end. Indian capital is beginning to do for Indian houses what the European conglomerates did for theirs. Aditya Birla’s majority stake in Sabyasachi and Titan’s backing of Zoya are early examples of an ecosystem forming, not a compromise of independence.
What this is not
This is not a nationalist argument, and it is not a complaint about Europe. The partnership between Fendi and Chanakya, which I examined in The Hands and the Name [link to AG page], is honourable and fairly credited. European houses built something magnificent, and Indian founders should study them closely.
The point is narrower. Study the Maison, but do not wear it. A house that borrows its entire architecture will always be measured against the original. A house built on its own logic can only be measured against itself.
The question that remains
Principles are the easy part. The hard part is building the structure underneath them: how master craftspeople are named and protected, how apprenticeship keeps a lineage alive, and how the base economics work for the hands as well as the house. That is the subject of the next LC Strategy Paper, due in November, and it deserves more than a newsletter.
One question matters more than any paper, though. Which Indian brands are already building their own architecture rather than borrowing one? The answer will not come from analysts. It will come from founders who decide, one house at a time, that the Maison is worth studying and not worth wearing.
India has already proved it can earn like a luxury market. The next decade decides whether it builds like one.
SOURCES
FY25 revenues from Tofler data, as reported by Business Standard, January 2026. Sabyasachi Calcutta LLP audited FY25 and FY26 revenues from CARE Ratings, June 2026. The Tarun Tahiliani figure is a reported estimate.
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The framework behind this argument, the Shilp-Griha, is set out in full in The Shilp-Griha Manifesto, LC Strategy Paper No. 3. Free to read at luxuryconnect.in/lc-intelligence.
This post was first published at https://abhaygupta.in/writing/hermes-or-gucci-indias-next-great-luxury-house-should-be-neither/