By the end of 2025, the Indian fashion, beauty, and retail market felt different in ways that were hard to miss. Some malls remained at capacity, while others emptied out. Some brands scaled, while others stalled. Outside the store, demand moved through phones and hyper-local delivery networks, increasingly bypassing traditional retail altogether.
After years of capital-fuelled expansion, the market stopped entertaining ideas based on potential alone. Instead, it began asking exacting questions: Does this move inventory? Does this make money? Does this work when the funding dries up?
Not every answer was reassuring.
1. Quick Commerce Became Central
Quick commerce had been circling fashion and beauty for years, but in 2025, its role changed materially. The sector reached an estimated $5.5 billion, effectively duopolised by Blinkit (~45 percent share) and Zepto (~30 percent).
Crucially, the use case shifted. Last-minute demand migrated from pantry top-ups to lifestyle emergencies. During the Diwali gifting window, 10-30 minute delivery became the default for categories previously ruled by marketplaces: accessories, beauty, and apparel basics.
Pilgrim recorded a 5-6X year-on-year rise, and Bombay Shaving Company noted approximately 100% growth in Christmas sales through quick commerce channels. Fashion retailer Campus Sutra registered a 20% uptick during the festive days.
The infrastructure reflects this permanence. Dark store counts in India are projected to triple to 7,500 by 2030, up from approximately 2,525 in late 2025. The implication is clear: speed is no longer a premium add-on; for the modern Indian consumer, it is the retail baseline.
2. Fastest-Growing Luxury Market
India continued to rank among the world’s fastest-growing luxury markets in 2025. Bain & Company estimates that the country’s luxury market could reach $85-90 billion by 2030, driven by rising household wealth, an expanding middle class and increasing demand from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.
Despite advances in digital retail, physical stores continued to dominate high-end consumption. Bain estimates that around 80 percent of personal luxury goods sales in India still occurred offline in 2025, underscoring the importance of in-person experience in luxury purchasing.
Consumer preferences, however, continued to evolve. While craftsmanship and quality remained central, demand gradually shifted away from overt logo-led consumption toward subtler, more culturally grounded expressions of luxury; a change reflected across fashion, jewellery and accessories.
3. The End of the Generic Mall
The divergence within physical retail became increasingly visible in 2025.
Knight Frank India identified 74 “ghost malls” across 32 cities, defined as shopping centres with vacancy rates exceeding 40 percent. Of the 365 centres surveyed, these underperforming assets accounted for 15.5 million square feet of largely underutilised retail space, often burdened by outdated formats, weak tenant mixes and declining relevance.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, ultra-luxury brands began questioning the mall itself as the default container for aspiration. In 2025, a growing number of high-end labels shifted away from generic luxury malls toward experiential retail housed in restored colonial bungalows, havelis and heritage buildings.
These spaces offered narrative depth that modern retail boxes could not. Architecture became part of the brand proposition, allowing luxury labels to anchor themselves in ideas of craft, history and place rather than scale alone.
4. Capital Became Selective
Investment activity across fashion, beauty and retail in 2025 reflected caution rather than retreat. Private equity and venture capital flows remained uneven, with investors prioritising capital efficiency, scale readiness and profitability amid global macro uncertainty.
Direct-to-consumer brands continued to attract interest, but the bar rose. Investors favoured companies with strong product differentiation, repeat demand and defensible unit economics. Strategic acquisitions by large incumbents emerged as a key route to scale, as established players opted to absorb proven digital brands rather than build them internally.
A defining transaction was Hindustan Unilever Limited’s acquisition of a 90.5 percent stake in Minimalist for approximately ₹2,955 crore in January 2025, signalling sustained appetite for profitable, science-led beauty brands with mass potential.
Beauty and Personal Care
Funding in beauty and personal care remained active but selective. Public deal data indicates that over $100 million flowed into the sector during 2025, with investors favouring formulation credibility, repeat usage and distribution leverage.
Notable transactions included Moxie Beauty’s $15 million Series A and FAE Beauty’s ₹17 crore raise, reflecting interest in performance-led products tailored to Indian consumers. Integration with quick-commerce platforms also emerged as a secondary consideration for high-repeat categories.
Fashion and Apparel
In 2025, funding for internet-first fashion and apparel brands has concentrated around fewer companies, with a total of $232 million raised in India across a smaller number of rounds compared to the previous year.
Key raises included GIVA’s $73.7 million round, Snitch’s ₹278 crore raise, and Purple Style Labs’s $40 million fundraise. Investor interest skewed toward defined segments such as menswear, jewellery and occasion-led fashion rather than broad apparel plays.
5. Growth Shifted Beyond Metros
Growth momentum continued to move away from India’s largest cities.
According to logistics intelligence platform ClickPost, non-metro regions accounted for nearly three-quarters of e-commerce orders during the 2025 festive season, with Tier-3 cities alone contributing more than half of total volumes.
Platform data also reflected this shift. Myntra has indicated that around 40-45 percent of demand for international fashion brands now originates from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.
Consumers in these markets increasingly moved beyond essentials toward discretionary and experiential categories, including premium fashion, beauty and dining.
6. The Death of 'Millennial' Marketing
Perhaps the most intangible but significant shift was in tone. Marketing in fashion and beauty is moving away from the polished, sales-led language that defined the last decade of brand building.
Gen Z consumers have increasingly rejected highly produced campaigns, dismissing them as "millennial cringe." The slick, scripted storytelling that worked in 2024 now feels culturally late.
The Bottom Line
In 2025, we saw a few fundamental shifts in shopping, marketing, and funding: speed became an expectation, capital became a reward for discipline, and growth shifted geographically.
In 2026, the advantage will belong to brands that understand where demand has moved, how attention is earned, and which parts of the old system no longer deserve to be defended.