Ritu Kumar trained in art history at Lady Irwin College in Delhi, then at Briarcliff College in New York, and then in museology at the Ashutosh Museum of Indian Art in Calcutta. Her entry into clothing was accidental. In 1966, in a village outside Kolkata, she came across a community of hand-block printers whose trade had been in decline since the colonial period. She commissioned a small run of printed saris. They sold. She commissioned more. She was twenty-two.

The Ritu Kumar label, founded in 1969 in Calcutta, is the longest-continuously-operating post-Independence Indian fashion house. Its premise, unchanged, is that the craft vocabularies of the subcontinent — block printing in Rajasthan, zardozi in Lucknow, bandhej in Kutch, chikankari in Awadh, ikat in Andhra — constitute a living archive whose survival depends on regular, well-paid commercial patronage.

The Book, and the Archive

In 1999 Ritu Kumar published Costumes and Textiles of Royal India, a 400-page illustrated study of the ceremonial wardrobe of the princely states, compiled over two decades. The book remains the single most important English-language reference on pre-Independence Indian dress.

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Indian fashion is not vintage. It is a living thing. The crafts are still being practised. What we do is organise the demand. — Ritu Kumar

The Business

The Ritu Kumar business today operates twenty-seven retail stores across India. A diffusion line, Label by Ritu Kumar, launched in 2002, brings the craft vocabulary into Western silhouettes for working women. A menswear line, Ri, launched in 2012. Family-owned, the company reported revenues of ₹500 crore (approximately USD 60 million) in 2023.

The Bridal Market

A substantial portion of the contemporary Indian wedding market — families routinely spend USD 20,000 to USD 200,000 on bridal wardrobe — runs through Ritu Kumar and her commercial descendants (Sabyasachi, Manish Malhotra, Tarun Tahiliani). Kumar was, by thirty years, the first.

She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2013 and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2015. Her personal archive was donated in 2020 to the National Museum of India in Delhi — the largest single designer-archive the museum holds. She is eighty at the time of writing and continues to design actively.