LONDON — Priya Ahluwalia, who has been showing on the London Fashion Week schedule since 2022, is taking a break, skipping what would have been her sixth show season and focusing on honing the business.
“I’m thinking about selling differently than if I had been doing a show,” said Ahluwalia during a preview from her Soho studio, which is part of the Ridley Scott Creative Group.
She’s produced a look book that consists of 30 tightly edited looks that take their cues from “collecting information” and “archiving.”
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The young designer with Nigerian-Indian origins has incorporated files and documents into T-shirts, and has used a fading method on some of the pieces and inserted pieces of gold embroidery onto the shirts and dresses.
Even though she’s not showing, she still plans to sell. In addition, she said e-commerce is doing well, and she’s been spending time redesigning the website.
This season Ahluwalia is also focusing on her partnership with Pandora, which sponsored her spring 2025 show.
Her relationship with the Danish jewelry brand has developed since then, and she’s designed a small capsule collection that includes six designs, from a map of Africa to a paisley print that’s found in Indian embroidery.
“Sometimes you do partnerships and the teams really enjoy working together — [with Pandora] it felt like a natural progression. I speak about it all the time that I’d love to design jewelry and homeware — and I’d said it to Pandora. They proposed I design engraving as the lead time wouldn’t be that long,” said the designer.
“Pandora’s engraving offer continues to grow in popularity, so it felt like the perfect opportunity to create something completely unique while still easily accessible,” said Rosie Reeves, acting head of public relations for Pandora U.K.
The designer said there were other reasons behind her decision to skip the shows this season.
“September felt like five minutes ago, and I love shows so much, but when you’ve got a small team, a lot of your focus goes on the show, from production to figuring out sponsorship and this is not even talking about doing the collection.”
The designer said she’s involved in every aspect of the business still and monitors the orders that come in via the website from places such as Oregon, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and New York.
Ahluwalia is not alone in skipping the show season — her peers such as Aaron Esh, Yuhan Wang, Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault of Knwls, Nensi Dojaka and Chopova Lowena are also absent from the LFW calendar.
“In London, the great thing is that loads of the designers get on really well and so when I’d been chatting to people before Christmas, everyone was saying they think they’re going to miss February and do September. Straightaway I knew that it’s not necessarily a smart time to spend thousands on a show if lots of people are skipping it,” she said, explaining that it also makes casting models harder as they tend to skip coming to town and not many of the international press will be traveling to London.