Ria.S

I did not set out to build a brand. I set out, twenty years ago, to understand fit — properly, from the inside, the way you only can when you spend years standing behind women in fitting rooms, watching what actually happens to fabric on a real body, not a mannequin. That's where this really began: not with sarees, but with blouses, and with the thousand small adjustments that decide whether a garment feels finished or merely worn.

Over the years, that fitting-room education turned into something broader — an eye for fabric, for how a weave should fall, for the difference between a piece that photographs well and one that actually lives with a woman through a long day, a long ceremony, a long season. I learned to read cloth the way you'd read a person: what it's capable of, what it isn't, and what it needs from the body wearing it.

"Curation, to me, was never about finding a lot of beautiful things. It's about saying no, again and again, until what's left actually earns its place."

That's the instinct behind Rakhi & Co. Every saree in the collection has been through my hands — sourced directly, checked for fabric, color and weave in person, and chosen against a point of view rather than simply added to a catalogue. I still believe the best way to know if a piece is right is to hold it, not to look at a photograph of it. So that's how we work: I go to the source, I look, I touch, and mostly, I say no. What survives that process is what reaches you.

The fit expertise is the part I'm proudest of, and the part we're still building toward at full scale. Twenty years of dressing real women — not size charts — taught me things about the Indian figure that no standard sizing ever accounts for: how an armhole should sit on a fuller frame, how a back panel needs to be cut differently depending on height, how "one size" was never really a size at all. Custom blouse stitching, built on that same understanding, is where this is headed next.