When Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail announced it would bring SHEIN back to India, after the Chinese fast-fashion giant was banned in 2020, headlines called it a “comeback.” But in truth, it was a sign of something larger.
India is entering a new phase: conglomerates are buying, partnering, and building fashion portfolios with the ambition of creating something like France’s LVMH or Kering.
Aditya Birla Fashion & Retail Ltd (ABFRL) has bought into Sabyasachi, Shantanu & Nikhil, and Jaypore. Reliance Brands Ltd (RBL) has invested in Abraham & Thakore, Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla, and holds distribution rights for Jimmy Choo, Tiffany, Balenciaga, and more. Tata Group runs Tata CLiQ Luxury, India’s first home-grown e-luxury platform.
On paper, it sounds like the beginning of an Indian luxury empire. But scratch beneath the surface, and you’ll see the difference between aggregation and creation.
India’s corporate giants are collecting labels, yet no one has built a house of brands with a singular cultural vision. Not yet.
The Missing Middle: From Craft to Brand
Indian fashion is rich in names and talent, Sabyasachi, Rahul Mishra, Manish Malhotra, but these are designer-led brands, not business-led empires. LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) didn’t rise on creative genius alone; it grew by acquiring, consolidating, and institutionalizing creativity under a powerful business model.
India lacks that “aggregator” mindset. No group has yet played the role Bernard Arnault did: buying legacy brands, professionalizing them, and creating a luxury house portfolio. Indian designers tend to operate as solo entrepreneurs, not as part of an integrated vision that scales across categories and markets.
Where LVMH turned French craft into cultural capital, monetised through storytelling, design, and control; India turned its craft into a supply chain. We became the world’s workshop.
The New Builders: Reliance, Aditya Birla, Tata
Let’s give credit where it’s due. For the first time, Indian business groups are taking luxury seriously; not just as a retail category, but as a strategic asset class.
Reliance
- Reliance Brands’ portfolio now includes over 60 international labels, spanning fashion, beauty, and lifestyle.
- Its 2025 licensing partnership with SHEIN marks a shift from importing brands to manufacturing them locally for export.
- By 2026, Reliance aims to onboard 1,000 Indian suppliers producing SHEIN’s garments for U.S. and U.K. markets.
- It’s a logistical coup, and a geopolitical one, positioning India as a post-China manufacturing hub.
But culturally, it tells another story. By bringing back a Chinese-origin, fast-fashion label, Reliance is proving India’s industrial capability, not its identity. It’s scaling production, not prestige.
Aditya Birla Fashion & Retail
ABFRL, meanwhile, is investing in the language of luxury.
Its acquisitions: Sabyasachi (51 %), Shantanu & Nikhil (51 %), Jaypore represent an attempt to institutionalise Indian heritage brands. For designers long constrained by capital and scale, this corporate backing could mean global reach. But ABFRL is still in the early stage of brand incubation, not conglomeration.
Tata Group
Tata’s CLiQ Luxury has given India’s affluent consumers a digital home for global brands, merging editorial storytelling with e-commerce. It’s India’s first real experiment in luxury retail experience rather than pure sales. But again, it’s a platform, not a producer.
What India Is Building, and What’s Still Missing
1. Capital Without Patience
Luxury takes decades to build. European houses think in 30-year arcs; Indian investors think in quarterly returns. LVMH spends billions on legacy, not just logistics. Indian groups are still learning to hold nerve when ROI takes time.
2. Brand Without Belief
We have designers. We have buyers. We even have buzz. Our brands sell stories of “heritage” and “handcrafted,” but not yet modern desire. Luxury isn’t just old; it’s timeless. We’re still learning that language.
3. Craft Without Control
India’s craft economy is vast but fragmented. Banarasi weavers in Varanasi, Kanchipuram silk makers, leather workers in Agra and Chennai, embroiderers in Kutch, and Kolhapuri sandal artisans all produce world-class work, yet operate in decentralised clusters with little IP protection or brand ownership. Their creations inspire global fashion houses, but the credit rarely returns home.
4. Consumption Without Identity
India’s new wealthy spend lavishly, but mostly on global names. Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Dior. We equate luxury with import, not inheritance. Until Indian consumers find pride in wearing India, not just buying it for the diaspora, the domestic market will remain tilted toward the foreign.
Towards an Indian LVMH: What It Will Take
An Indian LVMH will not be born by copying the French playbook. It will emerge by redefining luxury in India’s own image. Creating that kind of cultural and commercial force will require four fundamental shifts:
1. Professionalising Craftsmanship
India’s strength has always been its artisans, embroiderers in Lucknow, weavers in Kanchipuram, tanners in Kanpur, silversmiths in Jaipur. But for too long, this talent has remained unorganised, underpaid, and invisible.
To build a true luxury ecosystem, craftsmanship must evolve from informal labour into viable creative enterprise.
This means design schools partnering with craft clusters, transparent supply chains that give artisans equity in the value they create, and technology that documents provenance.
When an Indian bag or sari can tell the buyer who made it, where, and why, handwork becomes not just ethical, it becomes elite.
2. Institutional Capital and Patience
Luxury is slow money. It demands decades of storytelling before it yields profits.
For India to birth its own LVMH, investors must learn patience.
Conglomerates like Reliance and Aditya Birla have the cash. What’s missing is conviction to keep investing through years of growth, to protect creative direction even when returns lag. An Indian LVMH won’t be built in a quarter. It will be built across generations.
3. Cultural Confidence: Making “Made in India” Aspirational
Indian luxury often struggles with self-image. We describe our best products as handmade, artisanal, heritage, words that sell nostalgia, not desire. To go global, we must learn to frame “Made in India” not as rustic, but refined.
Japan did this after the 1950s; Korea is doing it now. They took traditional aesthetics and turned them into global design languages. India can do the same, by modernising heritage rather than mimicking Western style. True luxury is not imitation; it’s interpretation.
When a brand can make a handwoven ikat feel as contemporary as a Dior suit, we will have crossed the bridge from craft to couture.
4. Cross-Category Vision: Building an Ecosystem of Desire
LVMH didn’t stop at fashion. It moved into beauty, jewelry, watches, wine, hotels, creating a full sensory economy of luxury. India’s version will need the same breadth.
That means connecting fashion to lifestyle, beauty to wellness, scent to story.
Imagine a house that moves from a Banarasi textile to a skincare ritual using Indian botanicals, to a perfume inspired by the monsoon. The goal is not to replicate Paris, it’s to create an Indian universe of taste.
And when that day comes, India won’t just make for the world. It will make the world want what India makes.