When they started Lovebirds in 2014, Amrita Khanna and Gursi Singh didn’t have any grand plans. No PowerPoint. No strategy. ‘We fell in love – and then we wondered why we weren’t creating together,’ Khanna says. When they met, Khanna was running a small shop in Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village, selling vintage and reworked garments. Singh was working in advertising. They made a small collection of anti-fit clothes, graphic in shape and print: ‘Very Scandinavian, minimal. Off-white and beige. Very out of the country.’ They shot a lookbook, sent pictures to editors, slung on their backpacks and hopped off to Sri Lanka for a few weeks.
This was their first time visiting Geoffrey Bawa’s Lunuganga on the south-west coast. Once a cinnamon estate during the Dutch era and later a rubber plantation under British rule, the land was reimagined in 1949 by Bawa as a personal sanctuary and evolving experiment in Tropical Modernism. The lush and expansive landscape also served, in a full circle moment, as a ripe setting for Khanna and Singh’s 2026/27 Resort show last week. The collection – full of geometric patterns, dresses with rippled folds, shoulders cut away, floral patchwork and batik prints – had all the aesthetic attitude for which the brand is loved. ‘We wanted to respond to how Bawa reversed the inside and the outside of a place,’ the duo said afterwards.
‘In all of his projects, Bawa brought in local materials, local stories, local perspectives’
Gursi Singh, Lovebirds co-founder
Bawa, who died in 2003 at the age of 83, was instrumental in retuning colonial diktats about design and architecture. By the time he was 28, he had spent a third of his life away from Sri Lanka, but he moved back in 1948 with plans to create his own Italian garden. ‘The main part of Lunuganga was essentially designed and laid out by him before he became an architect in the early 1950s,’ says Channa Daswatte, Bawa’s last architectural partner. ‘It started there. A lot of these buildings form their own landscape. It’s really about looking at the idea of vistas, the idea of focus and so on. It’s always where your eye travels through. And where it rests.’
For Khanna and Singh, it was paradise primed for another kind of contemplation. ‘The value of this place isn’t widely recognised by people outside of architecture or design but, at this point in time, it stands for something a lot bigger,’ Singh says. ‘It is about a very unashamedly local identity. In all of his projects, Bawa brought in local materials, local stories, local perspectives.’
Bawa opened his practice in 1957 and was a modernist from the off. He’d returned from the Architectural Association and began building with concrete. ‘A kind of neo-colonial architecture,’ Daswatte says. Bawa then began to realise he could produce a modern architecture more rooted in context. He shifted away from concrete and glass to timber, rough granite and clay. ‘For him, architecture was not an object to just look at; it was a series of spaces one could experience. That experience was art, craft, people, everything you could get from within it. It was wholesome. It was utterly wholesome.’
Fashion brands from South Asia are often preceded by buzzwords of ‘sustainable’, ‘locally sourced’ or ‘artisanal’. But these just describe the reality of living and working in this part of the world. There’s a new subtle pushback on the assumption that showing and conquering the West is central to any kind of success. Lovebirds has five standalone stores in India and its collections are available globally yet the founders have avoided the seasonal showing schedule in the standardised European capitals. Their success has been built from local soil. ‘People have opened up to see what’s coming from South Asia and there are more voices internationally too. We used to have to explain ourselves so much, talking about how the fabrics had been made locally, or what crafts we were using and it felt very strange. It’s often used as a part of the storytelling but, for us as Indian brands, it’s not a choice,’ Singh says.
The duo use the word ‘modern’ a lot when talking about their clothes. Khanna sees ‘modern’ as a well-aware, locally informed point of view and a wardrobe that is functional anywhere in the world. ‘Take the restraint in Bawa’s design. You can really see where he decided to stop or take a step back. It’s how we are trying to approach everything too.’