Priya Ahluwalia is one of fashion’s most exciting names. Though she’s already won numerous prizes for her eponymous menswear and womenswear label, the 32-year-old Londoner isn’t resting on her laurels with exciting plans and collaborations in the pipeline for 2025, not to mention her side hustle as a film director. Here, Priya talks to us about the designers she admires, creating clothes with meaning and where she’d like to see the future of her brand.
Priya Ahluwalia is in serious need of a holiday, so it’s a good job she’s heading off on her first ever ski trip the day after we speak. The past 12 months have been eventful, capped off with the 32-year-old receiving the New Establishment Menswear prize at the British Fashion Awards, the glitziest event in London’s fashion calendar. “Oh, it was really nice, I had a fabulous night,” she says of her eponymous men’s and women’s brand winning the prize.
“I think that if people are being honest, fashion in general has been quite hard this past year. There have been so many things going on – multiple elections, wars, the economy is just terrible; it’s been challenging and the pressure of being a business owner has been quite acute. So, it was nice to know that people still appreciate what we’re doing in that way, and it was brilliant for my team, because we all won it together.”
Launched in 2018, just as Ahluwalia graduated from her Menswear MA at the University of Westminster, her namesake brand has, over the past seven years, not only become one of London’s most exciting and energising labels (in addition to her BFA, she was also a joint winner for the LVMH Prize in 2020, and was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design a year later) but one whose clothes and ethos have genuine meaning and connection to the people who wear them.
Loved by everyone from AJ Tracey and Wretch 32 to Mahalia, Leomie Anderson and Bethany Antonio, the super cool menswear and unashamedly sexy womenswear – easy to identify thanks to the bold approach to colour and texture, and laid-back, sports-inspired vibe – seem to be right at the epicentre of the buzziest bits of London’s music, film and fashion scenes. Ahluwalia may have won her Fashion Award for menswear but the women’s line, added in 2021, is an equal part of the business and the brand considers itself gender-neutral at heart, believing firmly that people are able to style themselves in whatever they want.
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