Somewhere between the moonlit sea and the final tableau, I stopped taking notes. A 2-storey house stood open on the stage like a cabinet of curiosities. Its upper floor was a Victorian parlour of ruffled dolls, and its lower deck was a captain's cabin with a ship's wheel and steamer trunks. Behind it, a full moon lit a painted ocean. This was CORD's evening, and for 1 night the label founded by Pranav Guglani and Neha Singh behaved like a Broadway house.
Indian fashion has a small, exclusive club of houses that understand a brand as a universe. Péro is its founding member. Aneeth Arora built a label where every hand-stitched animal, every playful button and every show reads as a chapter of one long, joyous story. If there is one brand that has got its marketing right after Péro, it is CORD. Both houses sell a world first and clothes second, and both have earned a devotion that most labels spend fortunes trying to buy.
Consider the evidence. CORD's Album '91 campaign recreated a 1990s family train journey in symmetrical, cinematic frames shot by Pranoy Sarkar, and it became one of the most discussed Indian campaigns of the year. The Delhi concept store is styled as a vintage train carriage. Prints carry names like Morning Coffee and High Tea, and the duck returns season after season like a beloved recurring character. Neha describes her customers as "co-creators of the Cord language." Pranav puts the whole strategy in a single line: "The aesthetics helped attract people, but nostalgia is what made them stay."
Most brands make a product and then go searching for a story to wrap around it. CORD works in reverse. The story comes first, the characters follow, and the clothes arrive as souvenirs of a place the customer already longs to visit. Here is the lesson for every founder chasing the algorithm: character outlasts virality. A customer who buys into a world returns for the next chapter.
The show made that world physical. The programme promised that "the CORD universe moves beyond clothes and into an immersive, theatrical experience," and CROW delivered exactly that. The company, founded by Nayantara Kotian and Prashant Prakash, is among the pioneers of immersive theatre in India, and its hand showed in every transition. The narrative followed a young Girl searching for her mother through a dreamscape peopled by Dolls, an Owl Postman, a Timeweaver, a Birdwoman, a Forest Creature and a Detective who doubled as Captain. Scenes dissolved from the moonlit sea into a winter forest of bare silver trees, where the Birdwoman unfurled enormous black feathered wings. An autumn wood glowed in burnt gold. A parlour sat beneath a blood-red sun, furnished with a striped market awning and a towering crimson wingback chair. Models walked the red carpet through the audience, past a trail of folded paper envelopes, as if the Owl Postman had just made his rounds.
The mise en scène was spectacular, and the clothes held their own within it. CORD's signatures were everywhere. Hand smocking, worked by artisans in Modinagar, gathered the bodice of a tiered floral gown. A duck-egg jacket blooming with embroidered hydrangeas sat over a brown wool maxi skirt finished with a woven green hem. Ivory duster coats wore faded crimson florals like old wallpaper. Tailoring arrived in Prince of Wales check, herringbone and patchwork, alongside plaid bloomers, lace jabots, crochet folded into skirts and quilted lantern sleeves stitched with tiny cottages and landscapes. Faux-fur trapper hats and Western boots gave the men a frontier swagger. The leather goods, where CORD began, carried the point home: lattice bags, oxblood cylinders and generous weekenders. Take away the wigs and the wings, and almost every look would walk straight into a wardrobe. That is the quiet genius of the house. The fantasy is staged, and the clothes are real.
A question followed me home all the same: where was the mother? The Girl searches through every room of this world. She meets the Dolls, follows the post and braves the forest. The mother remains offstage, absent from the cast list and unresolved at the curtain. Perhaps that is deliberate. The programme speaks of "the strange beauty of looking back," and a mother who lives only in longing is a deeply CORD idea. Theatre, however, rewards a resolved arc, and this narrative left a few threads hanging. It is a small quibble set against a considerable achievement.
The final tableau brought everyone together. Actors, models, the bearded elder in his patchwork knit, the top-hatted figure in his swirling fringed coat and the Birdwoman with her wings at rest filled the stage and spilled onto the floor below it, one large and eccentric family. Pranav and Neha stepped out to take their bow, applauding their cast.
"After 12 years of creating it piece by piece," read the programme, "we felt it was finally time to open the doors." CORD opened them with a coup de théâtre and asked its guests to "leave a little room for wonder." The rest of Indian fashion would do well to take a seat and take notes.
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Somewhere between the moonlit sea and the final tableau, I stopped taking notes. A 2-storey house stood open on the stage like a cabinet of curiosities. Its upper floor was a Victorian parlour of ruffled dolls, and its lower deck was a captain's cabin with a ship's wheel and steamer trunks. Behind it, a full moon lit a painted ocean. This was CORD's evening, and for 1 night the label founded by Pranav Guglani and Neha Singh behaved like a Broadway house.
Indian fashion has a small, exclusive club of houses that understand a brand as a universe. Péro is its founding member. Aneeth Arora built a label where every hand-stitched animal, every playful button and every show reads as a chapter of one long, joyous story. If there is one brand that has got its marketing right after Péro, it is CORD. Both houses sell a world first and clothes second, and both have earned a devotion that most labels spend fortunes trying to buy.
Consider the evidence. CORD's Album '91 campaign recreated a 1990s family train journey in symmetrical, cinematic frames shot by Pranoy Sarkar, and it became one of the most discussed Indian campaigns of the year. The Delhi concept store is styled as a vintage train carriage. Prints carry names like Morning Coffee and High Tea, and the duck returns season after season like a beloved recurring character. Neha describes her customers as "co-creators of the Cord language." Pranav puts the whole strategy in a single line: "The aesthetics helped attract people, but nostalgia is what made them stay."
Most brands make a product and then go searching for a story to wrap around it. CORD works in reverse. The story comes first, the characters follow, and the clothes arrive as souvenirs of a place the customer already longs to visit. Here is the lesson for every founder chasing the algorithm: character outlasts virality. A customer who buys into a world returns for the next chapter.
The show made that world physical. The programme promised that "the CORD universe moves beyond clothes and into an immersive, theatrical experience," and CROW delivered exactly that. The company, founded by Nayantara Kotian and Prashant Prakash, is among the pioneers of immersive theatre in India, and its hand showed in every transition. The narrative followed a young Girl searching for her mother through a dreamscape peopled by Dolls, an Owl Postman, a Timeweaver, a Birdwoman, a Forest Creature and a Detective who doubled as Captain. Scenes dissolved from the moonlit sea into a winter forest of bare silver trees, where the Birdwoman unfurled enormous black feathered wings. An autumn wood glowed in burnt gold. A parlour sat beneath a blood-red sun, furnished with a striped market awning and a towering crimson wingback chair. Models walked the red carpet through the audience, past a trail of folded paper envelopes, as if the Owl Postman had just made his rounds.
The mise en scène was spectacular, and the clothes held their own within it. CORD's signatures were everywhere. Hand smocking, worked by artisans in Modinagar, gathered the bodice of a tiered floral gown. A duck-egg jacket blooming with embroidered hydrangeas sat over a brown wool maxi skirt finished with a woven green hem. Ivory duster coats wore faded crimson florals like old wallpaper. Tailoring arrived in Prince of Wales check, herringbone and patchwork, alongside plaid bloomers, lace jabots, crochet folded into skirts and quilted lantern sleeves stitched with tiny cottages and landscapes. Faux-fur trapper hats and Western boots gave the men a frontier swagger. The leather goods, where CORD began, carried the point home: lattice bags, oxblood cylinders and generous weekenders. Take away the wigs and the wings, and almost every look would walk straight into a wardrobe. That is the quiet genius of the house. The fantasy is staged, and the clothes are real.
A question followed me home all the same: where was the mother? The Girl searches through every room of this world. She meets the Dolls, follows the post and braves the forest. The mother remains offstage, absent from the cast list and unresolved at the curtain. Perhaps that is deliberate. The programme speaks of "the strange beauty of looking back," and a mother who lives only in longing is a deeply CORD idea. Theatre, however, rewards a resolved arc, and this narrative left a few threads hanging. It is a small quibble set against a considerable achievement.
The final tableau brought everyone together. Actors, models, the bearded elder in his patchwork knit, the top-hatted figure in his swirling fringed coat and the Birdwoman with her wings at rest filled the stage and spilled onto the floor below it, one large and eccentric family. Pranav and Neha stepped out to take their bow, applauding their cast.
"After 12 years of creating it piece by piece," read the programme, "we felt it was finally time to open the doors." CORD opened them with a coup de théâtre and asked its guests to "leave a little room for wonder." The rest of Indian fashion would do well to take a seat and take notes.
TO BE CONTINUED, FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.
This is where the surface ends and the reporting begins.
The complete piece, the full archive, and access to The French Press Circle. Reporting answerable only to its readers.
Already a subscriber ?
Login
Read these on the house, with our compliments.
A selection from the current issue, open to all readers. Read them in full. The rest is one decision away.