When we speak with Ritwik Khanna, founder and creative director of Rkive City 2050 over the phone, he is in his newly opened store—a space that doubles as a studio and atelier—in Delhi’s Dhan Mill Compound, preparing for a whirlwind trip to Paris. “It’s a guerilla-style pop-up during Men’s Fashion Week,” he says, about his seemingly off-the-cuff plans. In fact, these are best-laid plans, put in place several months ago when Khanna intuitively collaborated with fellow designer and LVMH Prize semi-finalist Kartik Kumra of Karu Research on a line of patchwork denim clothing and bags featuring mirrorwork, natural patina dyes (an Rkive City regular), and colour-blocking.
Nothing is ever off-the-cuff with Khanna. For his brand, every move is a well-thought-out step towards intuitively finding promise where gaps exist, and betting on them far ahead of market headwinds. After all, for the fashion business management student from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), New York, it is all about finding what makes good business sense. Saving the planet? A value-add that’s also good for the soul.
Khanna’s trajectory as a successful emerging Indian designer with roots in sustainability and circularity is one that he kickstarted trading in a second-hand market back at FIT. “I was intrigued by the entire second-hand market. What does the supply chain look like? What actually happens to clothes after you're done wearing them?” While his peers on the fashion business management course at FIT took up after-school jobs waiting tables at restaurants, Khanna resorted to the deep second-hand archives of eBay. Here, he discovered a community that cared about the provenance of clothes.
“I found people who would relate to clothing like I did. And then I found Supreme, which was quite cult-ish where everybody wanted to know what you're wearing, and talk about what they were wearing themselves. There's a deeper attachment to clothing compared to just, ‘oh, this is what I bought to go out on a night out’. That pretty much changed the perspective for me,” he explains. It was also good business. “You get these T-shirts for US$38 every Thursday, and if you go on eBay and sell them, you'll get US$100. That was straight US$70 or US$65 on each piece. I calculated—I could hire people to stand in virtual queues for me every time there was an exclusive Supreme drop, and I’d be able to scale this.”
Things eventually got bigger. Khanna started investing in archival Raf Simons and Rick Owens. “We'd invested in old archival runway pieces that we would import from either Japan or Paris and then sell it to people in New York for a higher markup. We started on the street but I was like okay, how do I actually make this into a business?”
With all the highly coveted vintage pieces acquired and ready to be scaled into a larger second-hand business, Khanna shortlisted a store in New York City’s Lower East Side as a home for the prized pieces. However, the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, and all his plans went awry. Overnight, Khanna found himself back in his hometown of Amritsar where his family had been running a textile business for generations. Still in student mode, Khanna began to study the supply chain of post-consumer waste from the new surroundings of his ancestral home. A rabbit-hole research session led him to learnthat donation charities like Salvation Army and Goodwill Foundation in the US were selling second-hand clothes to India, where the waste was further sorted and then sold to Ghana. “I ended up in Gujarat, hit up a few factories, and barged in to understand how their raw material was generated.” Armed with on-ground experience in understanding textile waste management, Khanna now saw the business opportunity in further buying the waste from the supplier in Gujarat and using it as the base for his own fashion design company.
“FOR ANYTHING TO BE CIRCULAR, THE LOOP OF THE RAW MATERIAL SHOULD STAY IN THE LOOP. IF THE RAW MATERIAL IS BEING ABLE TO BE USED AGAIN AND AGAIN WITHOUT DETERIORATING THE QUALITY, IT IS CIRCULAR”Ritwik Khanna
Denim, that hard-working, ubiquitous textile in all wardrobes, became the choice of Khanna’s tinkerings for several reasons. “Firstly, it was the easiest to deliver a message,” he explains. “It's a universal language that can go far beyond age, gender, or any norms. If there was one fabric to make an impact with, it would have to be democratic denim.” Globally, the denim industry is known to be environmentally unfriendly—from the pesticides used to grow its raw materials to the chemical dyes and copious water usage to make each pair—1800 gallons per average pair of jeans, to be exact. “It was important to close the loop on this incredibly wasteful textile.” Khanna, with a team of master tailors (at first reticent to work on pre-owned garments) began the process of deconstructing and then reconstructing the clothes into modern silhouettes like flared jeans, skirts, jackets, and even home items like patchwork denim cushions for the couch or sofa.
“For anything to be circular, the loop of the raw material should stay in the loop. If the raw material is being able to be used again and again without deteriorating the quality, it is circular,” Khanna explains the inner workings of starting a label on the premise of upcycled denim. With this in mind, Rkive City is set to be a circular label by 2025, when they will officially start accepting clothing sold to consumers back to where they were bought from, to be made into something modern once again. The label already hosts evenings for its teams to bring their old denims to be redone by Rkive City. “It’s always so great to see someone coming in with their dad’s denims and saying that he used to wear these all the time and now that he’s no more, I want to remember him by wearing them again,” says Khanna.
With no technical training in design, Khanna is quick to state that above all, the label is both a research house and a design label. From the denim trends that dominated the ’80s and ’90s to what goes around and comes around in the market, the atelier is also a place of study. This is how the label paired up with a similar design and research house, Reformery, to come up with design solutions on how to use post-consumer textile waste in brick-making. “It's really interesting—the brick is made out of mud and limestone and all these different mixes, and then it's glued together. It becomes more solid over a period of time as it ages,” he says.
In March this year, Khanna opened his store in Dhan Mill Compound, a stone’s throw from photographer Bharat Sikka’s studio and Nor Black Nor White’s colourful store. “It’s the raw exposed brick walls that remind us of Brooklyn in New York,” he says of the community of creatives who are trying to find a bit of their New York state of mind in Delhi’s up-and-coming retail landscape.
That Khanna would choose to have a brick-and-mortar store, and barely any digital footprint (the label does not have a website, and its official Instagram account has a minimal 18 posts) might come across as startling. “Fashion didn't mean shit to me until I actually experienced how it was made,” he says. “Holding a qualitative piece in your hand is unmatched.” A key reason why the store also has the atelier at the back where masterjis work on the sourced denim is so that people can experience the making of the clothes they are wearing, to see everything that goes into something. “This transparency is so important to what we are trying to do as a brand. I'm still struggling to find a way to communicate that online in a fun, interesting and more personal way,” shares Khanna.
For future plans, he wants to use the store as a space for artists to come and create—a summer camp of sorts. The only caveat? “They’d have to use the medium of post-consumer textile waste.”
The future is, in fact, something that Khanna thinks about a lot. It is also why the name of the brand is ‘Rkive City 2050’—a play on his initials ‘RK’ and love for archival, yes, but also a gathering and community of people with similar values and beliefs. “So many brands glorify the past by proclaiming that they were established in so-and-so year. But for us, it’s more about where do we want to be? For us, by 2050, we want to be in a place where all Indian post-consumer or pre-consumer textile waste is in a supply chain which is managed or somewhat run by us,” he concludes.