Lovebirds Brings Everyday India to London Fashion Week With ‘India: IYKYK’ SS27

Lovebirds Has Something to Say About Indian Style With “India: IYKYK”

Lovebirds got something to say about Indian fashion style with its Spring/Summer 2027 runway collection. Entitled “India: IYKYK,” the season marked the Delhi-based label’s London Fashion Week debut and turned away from the postcard version of India in favor of something much more specific: the signs, objects, textures and visual memories that people who grew up there simply know.

Designers Amrita Khanna and Gursi Singh built the collection around everyday references rather than the usual outside-looking-in clichés. Painted photo-studio backdrops, oversized barber-shop combs, crowded signage, hand-painted Bollywood graphics and the familiar Ideal Boy school chart all enter the conversation — not as novelty props, but as images already embedded in ordinary life.

That makes the “IYKYK” part more than a clever title. The point is recognition. Lovebirds is not trying to introduce India as something exotic; it is taking the India the designers already know and translating those shared visual codes through a contemporary fashion lens.

The Familiar Stuff Becomes the Good Stuff

One of the strongest ideas comes from the Ideal Boy poster, the school-wall image familiar across generations in India. Lovebirds lifts details such as hands and ears from the figure and drops them into fabric and print, separating them from the original chart just enough to make you look twice.

The painted scenery once used in local photo studios gets similar treatment. Instead of reproducing it neatly, the team frays and reconstructs the imagery before bringing it into the clothes. It is memory being handled physically — cut apart, disturbed and made new without pretending the reference came from anywhere else.

Chintz Gets Pulled Apart and Put Back Together

Chintz sits at the center of the textile story. Lovebirds worked with block-printing artisans to alter classic chintz blocks through layering and disrupted repeats, then had artisans brush over the printed cloth by hand so some areas thin out while others become more saturated. The regularity gets broken on purpose.

That approach suits Lovebirds. The label has long worked with clean forms, restrained tailoring and Indian craft without turning the clothes into costume. Here, traditional technique is present, but it is being pushed, loosened and re-edited instead of simply displayed.

Banaras and Kutch Bring the Texture

The collection also brings in handwoven tussar silk, dupion silk and brocade developed with weavers in Banaras and Kutch. Even the brocades are not left pristine: Lovebirds frays them and works back into their construction, relaxing materials usually associated with a much firmer, more formal finish.

That is where Spring/Summer 2027 gets most interesting. The collection does not reject Indian craft, and it does not freeze it behind glass either. It treats craft as something living enough to be interrupted.

A London Debut Without the Tourist Brochure

For a first London Fashion Week showing — and Lovebirds’ first show outside Asia — the duo could have easily gone bigger, louder and more obvious about where they come from. Instead, they went more personal. “India: IYKYK” works because it assumes India is already complicated enough.

Khanna and Singh have spent roughly a decade building Lovebirds around functionality, modernity, playfulness and the beauty of ordinary things. This collection takes that same instinct and lets everyday Indian memory do the talking. No giant postcard required.

Gander the Lovebirds Spring/Summer 2027 runway selection below — familiar details, disrupted textiles and an India that does not need to explain itself to be understood.

Sources: LOVEBIRDS / Male Model Scene / British Vogue. Photography: Kiera Simpson, courtesy of LOVEBIRDS.