Archana Rao Label
Industry:
Year:
2024
Finding one world to design for two.
Archana Rao’s work had progressively moved between two disciplines: fashion design that slowly led to costume design.
At first, they can appear to ask very different things from a designer. Fashion builds a label and a recognisable point of view. Costume begins with someone else entirely: a character, a story, a time, a temperament.
The challenge was to create a brand world where both could belong without one feeling secondary to the other.
The answer came from looking more closely at what remained consistent across both practices.
Archana has always designed around strong individuals.
Whether she is imagining a character for film or designing a collection for her own label, there is often a distinct individual at the centre of the process: someone with her own contradictions, confidence, delicacy, humour, independence and story.
That became the starting point for everything that followed.
The Challenge
Bringing two creative practices into one world
Archana Rao could not be positioned only as a fashion label nor could costume design simply sit beside the label as another service.
Both were deeply connected to how she thinks and makes, but the connection between them had never been clearly articulated. The challenge was therefore larger than refining a visual identity.
We needed to understand what fashion and costume shared at their core, and build a world broad enough for both to exist naturally within it. The risk was creating something too fashion-led, where costume became an extension. Or something too cinematic, where the label began to feel like a character exercise.
What we needed was a central idea that could belong equally to both.
The Approach
Finding the individual behind the garment
We began by studying Archana’s process rather than the outputs of either discipline.
In costume design, a garment begins with a character.
Who is she?
What kind of life does she live?
How does she make decisions?
What does she reveal and what does she hold back?
We realised the same need for perfection and a sense of purpose existed within Archana’s fashion practice.
Her collections may not belong to a film, but they still feel inhabited by distinct women. The clothing might be delicate, romantic or intricately crafted, while the person wearing it feels strong, independent and entirely her own.
That tension was important.
Softness without fragility.
Femininity without passivity.
Romance without losing individuality.
The character was the common thread.
From characters to anthologies
Once we understood that, the brand stopped needing to behave like one continuous fashion story.
It could become a collection of stories.
We arrived at Anthology as the larger idea for Archana Rao: a world made up of different characters, collections, films, moods and moments, each complete in itself but connected through the same point of view.
An anthology does not ask every story to look or behave the same way. It allows each one its own voice while still belonging to something larger.
That made it particularly suited to Archana’s practice. A costume project could become one story. A fashion collection another. A collaboration, campaign or object could become another still.
The brand could evolve through characters rather than force every expression into one fixed aesthetic.
The Solve
Building a brand as a series of anthologies
Anthology became the framework that allowed fashion and costume to coexist.
Rather than defining Archana Rao by one discipline, it defined the way she sees people and creates worlds around them.
The consistency of the brand would no longer come from repeating the same imagery or visual devices but from a shared sensibility: character-driven, feminine but self-possessed, romantic but never fragile, detailed without needing to be loud.
Every new body of work could introduce another individual and another world while still feeling unmistakably Archana Rao.
Giving the anthology a visual language
Once the larger idea was established, the visual system became a tool to help tell it. Illustration felt natural because storytelling and intricate detail were already present in Archana’s work through pressed flowers, textiles, craft and costume. We brought together the tailorbird, fig and sampangi flower into a detailed composition in origin, memory and place.
The illustration was one artefact from within the anthology. Something that could appear, disappear, be cropped, discovered or reinterpreted depending on the story being told.
Refining what already felt like Archana
The palette followed the same principle.
Rather than introduce a completely new visual world, we worked with colours already associated with the brand and refreshed them. A brighter green introduced a feeling of renewal while remaining connected to what had come before.
The brand became quieter, lighter and more composed, but not unfamiliar. It was refinement rather than reinvention.
Designing for discovery
The richness of the illustration allowed us to use it with restraint where it could sit inside the lining of an envelope, emerge across the back of a garment or appear only as a fragment within communication.
We did not need to see the whole thing every time. In fact, withholding parts of it created more intrigue. This behaviour felt closely connected to the anthology itself. No single expression needed to explain the entire world.