Naushad Ali
Pondicherry
Pondicherry carries two histories at once, Tamil tradition and French colonial restraint sitting inside the same streets, sometimes the same wall, and Naushad Ali has spent over a decade designing directly out of that overlap rather than around it. After graduating from NIFT Chennai and spending time in the wider fashion industry, Ali made his way to nearby Auroville and set up Studio Liam in 2014, a label built specifically to carry the expertise of Indian craftsmen into contemporary, minimal clothing rather than treating heritage technique as a decorative footnote.
That minimalism is deliberate rather than default. Ali has described his own instinct as revisiting a design to adapt it rather than simply adding more to it, a restraint that shows up in cotton silhouettes and clean tailoring built to hold heritage fabric without competing with it. The brand began working with weavers in Bengal before moving south to Madurai and Chettinad, and its process now starts with the fabric itself rather than a sketched silhouette waiting to be filled in, a sequence that puts the weaver's decisions ahead of the designer's. A later collaboration with fourth generation Jodhpur block printers, using natural dyes across a range running from turquoise to pink, extended that same logic further north.
The studio itself sits inside a seventy year old house in White Town, formally acquired just three days before the 2020 lockdown, which left Ali with an unplanned stretch of time and a paintbrush, and he spent it painting the walls himself. The space holds the same restraint as the clothes, clean lines, well loved furniture, raw concrete, natural light interrupted only by the occasional, carefully placed pop of colour, alongside a bookshelf of art and design references, stacks of old fashion magazines that have covered the brand over the years, and a scattering of old fashioned glass paperweights across the tables.
Working in Pondicherry has never been incidental to the work itself. Ali has spoken about the town's spiritual quietness as something closer to worship than backdrop, a mix of Tamil culture and French influence he credits directly for the brand's minimal, modern aesthetic. Building a fashion label outside a metropolis brought real friction, buttons and thread included, everything the brand needed had to be brought in from elsewhere, a five year bet that the slower pace and quieter surroundings would pay for themselves.
What makes Naushad Ali worth paying attention to isn't just the clothing, it's the argument the whole practice makes quietly, that slowness and distance from a metropolis aren't limitations a designer has to work around, but conditions that can shape better, more considered work if given enough time to prove it.
Address: Corner Building, 6, Surcouf Street, White Town, Puducherry – 605001, India.