AKHL was founded by Akhil Nagpal in 2020. 

After graduating from the renowned Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2017 with various honours, he worked with leading designers in London and New Delhi before starting his label AKHL in 2020. 

AKHL is centered on radically reinventing traditional Indian hand-crafting techniques. Our endeavour is to not only push its frontiers through technical and material innovation but to also marry it with fresh visual interventions from post-modern art & architecture.

Ultimately, we’re about creating evocative, pan-cultural and new-age fashion that embraces touches of sexuality and subversion, thereby challenging existing narratives of what India can design and produce.

The genesis of all designs at AKHL is rooted in the development of distinctive and complex textiles, engineered using unusual materials and a wide range of re-invented textile crafting processes, including hand-weaving, hand-interlacing, traditional hand-embroidery, applique and gradient hand-dyeing.

AKHL pieces are also made different by their novel shapes and cuts that elementally emerge out of the structure, form and tactility of its one-of-a-kind textiles.

AKHL showcased its debut collection at Lakme Fashion Week Spring-Summer 2020 as the winner of the prestigious Gen Next competition and has been a recipient of various awards since then. AKHL won the Elle Graduates ‘Designer Of The Year Award’ in 2022 and The Grazia Young Fashion Awards in 2021.

AKHL is stocked at stores and platforms across the world including in North America, Europe, Middle-East and India and has been featured in articles and editorials in leading fashion publications including i-D UK, Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam, The Business of Fashion and Indian editions of Vogue, Elle, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Grazia and Cosmopolitan.