The Delhi-based designer’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection, Presence, turned the runway into a meditation on time, decay, and the beauty of what already exists. It also marked a major step for Indian fashion on the global stage.

MILAN — For most designers showing during Milan Fashion Week, the question is simple: what comes next? Dhruv Kapoor asked a different one.

His Spring/Summer 2027 collection, presented Tuesday afternoon on the official Milan runway, was titled Presence — a deliberate, almost defiant shift away from fashion’s obsession with the future and toward the quiet transformations happening in the present moment . It was a collection about time: how it softens fabrics, fades colors, leaves marks on the body, and turns the familiar into something new.

“If I were to describe this collection in three words, they would be awareness, transformation and continuity,” Kapoor said backstage .

A Career Built on Steady Growth

Kapoor, born in Delhi and trained at Istituto Marangoni in Milan, worked at Etro before launching his eponymous label in 2013 . His presence on the official Milan calendar has been incremental — a slow build rather than a sudden arrival — and that patience is now paying off.

His international distribution “is growing season after season,” Kapoor said. India remains his top market, where he opened his first flagship store in Delhi in January 2026 . But the brand is expanding in Japan, Korea, and the United States, with new distribution beginning in China and Brazil . His partnership with Anthropologie has also brought his designs to a wider American audience .

His continued presence on the Milan schedule has established him as one of the Indian names to watch — a designer who draws on his heritage while speaking a contemporary global language .

The Collection: Time as a Material

Presence translated its conceptual framework into a wardrobe built through layering, proportion, and movement. Silhouettes shifted from loose, elongated shapes to cropped or body-skimming volumes. Sun-faded olives, chalk, taupe, and washed blues were punctuated by saturated pink, electric blue, and acidic yellow — different stages of aging and growth held within a single palette .

The fabrics did the heavy lifting. Silk was bonded with jersey to create structure. Checks were crumpled and fused. Leather was wrinkled to evoke aged skin — though, as Kapoor noted, these were “developed specifically for my brand that look genuinely old and wrinkled yet are, in fact, utterly contemporary” . Faded denim, frayed appliqués, combined lace, softened poplin, and bonded tailoring all served the same idea: clothes that look lived in, that carry the marks of time and touch .

The prints echoed this theme. Images of moss-like formations, weathered wood, and sun-bleached posters appeared across garments, alongside prints that evoked “natural structures across a back” .

Indian Engineering, Reworked

The collection’s most distinctive element was its engagement with Indian garment traditions — not as literal references, but as methods.

Kapoor looked to the sari, dhoti, and lungi, taking their sense of wrapping, folding, and layering and working those gestures into contemporary silhouettes . The lungi, a wraparound garment often crafted from madras checks, was repurposed into engineered skirts for both women and men, covered in beads and crystals, or into shirtdresses in patchwork floral patterns . Draping became part of the construction, with traditional shapes stripped back to their simplest movements and rebuilt through new proportions .

“It’s as if, in today’s extremely fast-paced world, we grant ourselves a brief pause simply to notice what is happening around us,” Kapoor explained. “The stylistic language of this collection borrows from the Indian engineering of the sari, dhoti and lungi — garments that become methods of wrapping and layering, reconstructed through new proportions and configurations” .

The result was distinctly Indian without ever feeling like costume — a contemporary wardrobe that carries its heritage in its construction rather than its decoration.

The PUMA x RCB x Dhruv Kapoor Capsule

Perhaps the most unexpected element of the show was a three-piece capsule collection created in collaboration with PUMA and Royal Challengers Bengaluru, the Indian Premier League cricket franchise .

Rather than a conventional sportswear drop, the trio of statement jackets reworked existing PUMA pieces through Kapoor’s design language, reconstructing performance textiles and technical components and combining them with handcrafted interventions . Old-school track jackets were crafted from PUMA’s deadstock, limited to 24 pieces per style, harkening back to the street-savvy aesthetic of Kapoor’s early collections .

The wider PUMA x RCB x Dhruv Kapoor collection is scheduled to arrive during the 2027 IPL season, but the Milan reveal served as a first look — placing cricket fandom within a global fashion context .

Accessories and Collaborations

The accessories extended the collection’s dialogue between utility and reinvention. The ‘Constant’ trunk returned alongside an oversized vanity pouch, offered in wrinkled, bonded, and hand-embroidered variations. The brand’s Mary Jane returned with a square toe before evolving into a tasselled mule, while leather-wrapped thong sliders drew on the ease of Indian footwear traditions.

Eyewear came from a collaboration with Helsinki-based Paloceras, whose sculptural frames provided a precise counterpoint to the collection’s exploration of form and transformation . Lab-grown diamonds from Sennes by the House of Senco appeared in jewellery that complemented selected looks, continuing the collection’s dialogue between heritage and technology .

A Different Kind of Milan Moment

In a season dominated by Prada’s skirt-centric meditation and Glenn Martens’s farewell to Diesel, Dhruv Kapoor offered something quieter but no less significant: a designer asking fashion to pause.

His mood board, he said, included images of construction sites and moss-covered rocks, high-tech cable infrastructures and seashells fading under the sun . That contrast — the built and the organic, the fast and the slow — animated the entire collection.

As something decays, Kapoor seemed to suggest, something else is alive. And in a fashion system that rarely stops to notice, that is a radical proposition.