Chicago Indian Fashion Week Makes Its Debut

At The Rivvy Hotel on October 10, 2026, the runway was only one place to be seen.

Around the red carpet, guests joined models in front of the cameras for individual portraits and group photographs. The people who had come to watch had their own place in the picture. From my position behind the camera, this part of the inaugural Chicago Indian Fashion Week was almost a show of its own.

It was a fitting beginning for an event whose organizers had set out to bring fashion, culture and community into the same room.

Presented by Chicago Indian Arts, the first Chicago Indian Fashion Week arrived with a larger ambition than staging a night of designer presentations. Founder and president Jigar Shah described the project in his welcome to participants as a place for Indian and South Asian stories to be expressed through design, art, film, music and conversation. Fashion would provide the gathering point.

The debut gave that idea a physical home in Chicago: a runway, an audience, a red carpet and a team responsible for bringing them together.

Behind the debut was a team that included talent coordinator Nirali Shah, Zalak Patel and Siddhart Doshi, alongside the volunteers and production contributors helping bring the event together. As a photographer, I saw part of that preparation firsthand. On the night itself, what stood out was the attention given to guests. People were looked after, and the welcome felt personal.

The evening also felt remarkably settled for a first edition. From where I was working, the event was organized, well run and engaging throughout.

That care gave the fashion room to speak.

A model turns in a pink dress at the end of a reflective runway beneath Chicago Indian Arts lettering.

The inaugural theme, The Home and the World, drew on Rabindranath Tagore. “Many of us live between worlds,” Shah wrote in his welcome, describing the connections between India and America, heritage and modernity. Across four acts, Home, The Houses, The Street and The World, the program gave those ideas a fashion setting. The theme left room for different expressions of dress rather than a single defining look.

The lineup included The Saree Room, Prive Couture, Fabric da Vinci, Accessorize by Patsy, Rupali Shete and Priya Chhabria. In the photographs, that range is visible in the changing silhouettes: a pink skirt opening through a turn, a patterned jacket and trousers, the sweep of a white gown. Floral forms brought another kind of scale, surrounding a face and extending the portrait beyond the outline of the clothing.

A model in a light jacket and trousers with dark leaf-like patterns walks past seated guests.

A model in a white gown turns on the runway, the skirt extending across the foreground.

The red-carpet images offered a closer view. A turn of the shoulder revealed the fall of a pale blue scarf. Three people posed together against the Chicago Indian Arts backdrop. These were portraits made with the camera acknowledged, each person taking a place in the frame.

For me, those moments are central to the evening. The welcome gave people a way into an event built around being looked at. Fashion can be a highly public experience; feeling comfortable in that space matters.

A person in cream turns toward the camera, with a pale blue scarf falling down their back.

A face framed by radiating pale strands and pink flowers, with hands raised on either side.

One evening cannot establish what Chicago Indian Fashion Week will become. That will depend on what Shah and the team build next, and on the designers, participants and audiences who return. But its first edition has given them something concrete to build from.

My photographs record the clothes and the people who wore them. What I remember around those frames is the care taken with the people in the room. For a new event asking Chicago to come together, that is a meaningful place to begin.

Where Moments Become Visual Stories.