The atelier that embroidered for Dior and Prada for forty years has launched its own brand
Chanakya made the embroidery for Dior, Prada and Fendi. Now the mother and daughter Swali are taking the label Chorus to the global market — and 40% of its online sales already come from abroad.
For forty years the Indian textile house Chanakya International made some of the most complex embroidery in the world for other people’s labels: Dior, Prada, Fendi. The most visible moment came in 2023, when Chanakya’s artisans brought their craft to the Dior pre-fall show at the Gateway of India in Mumbai. Now the Mumbai atelier is attempting what succeeds far more rarely: turning from a manufacturer into a brand.
The label is called Chorus. It was founded at the end of 2025 by Karishma Swali, creative director and managing director of Chanakya International, together with her daughter Avantika. “Avantika and I created Chorus as an interdisciplinary practice rooted in the textile intelligence of the Indian subcontinent: we make womenswear, objects and works of art, presenting textile as architecture,” Swali says. The first cruise collection launches exclusively on Moda Operandi and in parallel on the brand’s own site.
The seven-month-old label already has two stores — in Mumbai and Delhi — and is stocked at Galeries Lafayette Mumbai. But it was years in the making. Behind it stand Chanakya’s forty-year history, some 10,000 recreated historical pieces and more than 100,000 documented craft experiments. Earlier still, mother and daughter launched the label Moonray, during the pandemic, “as a space of joy where craft, mindfulness and beauty met easily”. Moonray was closed in 2025 to make room for Chorus: “As Moonray’s roots deepened, so did its voice. Chorus is the next chapter.”
The difference is in the ambition. Moonray worked for the Indian market; Chorus is aimed at putting an Indian label alongside international contemporary brands without looking derivative. “The Chorus woman is curious, always searching and discerning. She moves freely between cultures and treats personal style as a form of self-expression,” Swali says of the audience.
The brand is built from five connected strands: ready-to-wear, the made-to-order line Chorus Edition, Chorus Café, Chorus Wellness and Chorus Concept. All of it is gathered in a three-storey store in a historic building in Mumbai. “Clothing stands next to wall art and sculpture, so the collection is never read in isolation — only as part of a larger material conversation.”
At the creative core, besides Swali herself, are the 19-year-old Avantika, studying art history at Stanford; Tina and Nikita Sutradhar, winners of the LVMH special jury prize in 2014; the designer Juhi Mehta; and the embroidery specialist Renu Sahu.
The cruise 2027 collection is built on the botanical language of Indian chintz and on the drape of the sari and the dhoti, two of the subcontinent’s oldest unstitched garments. Hence the fluidity: skirts that wrap and fall, tops that drape softly over the body. The collection was developed with Saliyar weavers in Tamil Nadu and Angami Naga weavers in Nagaland.
The timing is fortunate. Fashion is looking for greater diversity and turning east more and more often, and the customer is beginning to understand that craft is precisely the engine of contemporary luxury. “This is a genuinely interesting moment for craft in general. There is a growing understanding in the world of what these knowledge systems can give contemporary design,” Swali says. Since launch, 40% of Chorus’s online sales have come from overseas markets, particularly the Middle East and the US.
“We first presented the brand earlier this year through a trunk show and expanded the assortment on the strength of the response,” says Mark Rofsky, vice-president of ready-to-wear merchandising at Moda Operandi. Prices run from $420 to $7,200. “Chorus offers a unique price-to-value ratio with a feminine, refined aesthetic for which there is strong demand in the evening category.”
The Indian market meanwhile remains central for the founders. “We would like the markets to grow in parallel rather than in sequence. Chorus has always been a practice with Indian roots and a global outlook,” Swali explains.
That is the point of the story. It is not only about another Indian label arriving on the global stage. It is a shift in which the ateliers that shaped luxury behind the scenes for decades step forward and begin to define it under their own name.