Buyers and industry insiders have cribbed for ages: 'Indian fashion is too occasion-centric,' 'why can’t our runways be wardrobe-led?' 'why must couture be so obsessed with weddings?' There was really just one answer: a staggering $130 billion wedding market. But there's more to it than that. Indian occasionwear has always operated on an 'event-based' calendar rather than a weather-based one.
For Indian designers, investing heavily in winter-specific RTW outerwear has never made much commercial sense. A classic winter coat, for instance, has a far narrower window of use than the occasionwear that dominates the market.
In the West, however, outerwear is serious business. Coats have always been a big deal across luxury fashion and retail. The less obviously branded the coat is, the more influence it wields; quite like a walking billboard. It's instantly recognisable and at times a sweeping marker of its maker. Burberry carved its empire out of weatherproof gabardine; Max Mara's camel 101801 is an enormous feat in fashion thinking; Moncler built its holiday-forward identity around the puffer.
Buyers across the globe still value investment pieces especially the kind of outerwear that can be reworn, considering inflationary pressures. In a March report by WWD, Bergdorf Goodman’s Linda Fargo specifically talks about building a “coat wardrobe” around blousons and clean topcoats. At retail, coats remain a major category for buyers at Le Bon Marché, Harrods, Nordstrom and Mytheresa, with shoppers continuing to see outerwear as an investment piece.
But consumers across the globe are growing cautious about heavy knitwear or insulating coats as winter arrives weeks late, or disappears entirely into erratic warm spells. The wool's demand has been slashed in the luxury economy.
Amid climate change and fractured buying cycles, a $2,000 tailored coat engineered for sub-zero temperatures offers little utility in a 20°C (68°F) European November, even as the coat remains a core category in retail.
Global fashion's 18-month design-to-delivery seasonal calendar is buckling, driven by relentless climate volatility, shifting micro-climates, and erratic weather events. Conglomerates like LVMH and Kering are rethinking how often they produce clothing, which could dismantle the concept of biannual drops.
Valentino & Maison Margiela stripped down their traditional calendar presence and are reportdly transitioning to showing decentralized, destination-specific collections. Thom Browne, Sacai, and Coperni have often been absent from standard seasonal calendars, dropping collections when they choose rather than matching rigid wholesale retail windows.
McKinsey's State of Fashion 2025 report points out excess inventory, emissions, fashion waste and the need for agile supply chains as major industry issues. This also means seasonless fashion isn't necessarily just an aesthetic movement, but a business response.
The two-season model originated in Western markets and mainly relied on predictable meteorological cycles. Resort and pre-fall collections emerged as interstitial offerings. Retail floors stocked heavy Fall/Winter drops as early as August to prepare for October chills. In simple terms, clothing is largely climate-driven; the industry also assumed most fashion products shared similar lifecycles, i.e., about six months of spring-summer or autumn-winter.
Meanwhile, Indian designers have always worked with seasonless luxury through lightweight layering, sheer capes, and breathable silks, and may have been unwittingly ahead of the curve.
What Indian designers always knew
The coat in Indian fashion isn't designed to combat freezing temperatures; it's meant to transition effortlessly between air-conditioned indoors and warmer outdoors. The coat or the winter jacket wasn't typically survival wear but statement pieces. Not so much about the construction but more about artistry.
With tropical conditions year-round, creating heavy double-breasted overcoats was never a good idea for Indian designers.
Instead of adopting heavy Western canvassing, Indian design houses deconstructed the idea of the coat, and they prioritised visual volume without thermal weight.
Aseem Kapoor has gorgeous mushroom twill coats with resham thread embroidery, climate-conscious outerwear made of indigenous, breathable textiles like handspun Khadi, Chanderi, Tussar silk, and lightweight linen. Designers such as Anavila have also pointed back to traditional Indian textiles like mulmul, Kota, Mangalgiri cotton, khadi and similar fabrics, as inherently suited to heat because they breathe and manage moisture.
Many Indian couturiers routinely lean into open-front capes over relying on internal armholes and thick shoulder pads, which trap body heat and restrict movement,
In a 2020 LiveMint interview, Aneeth Arora, founder of the clothing label Péro, observed something interesting: “The coat’s idea in the West is to simply layer it over whatever you are already wearing. Most spaces there are centrally heated and the trench coat is seen as a part of outerwear, but in India that’s not a common case, so most thick overlayering garments are a part of winter-wear, to be worn inside and outside.”
In a 2024 interview with Elle India, Raw Mango's Sanjay Garg says, "We work with forms such as chanderi, mashru, brocade and chikankari. But we don’t adopt them as trends for a season and abandon them the next year. We’ve never stopped working with the textile forms we started with."
Multi-season line-ups are clearly more equipped to deal with the buying crisis. Sabyasachi's New York Fashion Week stint on the official CFDA calendar raised eyebrows domestically. No one expected to see Christy Turlington in a denim coat or a cow print outerwear from the occasionwear savant.
But Sabya understands design mechanics better than most; by anchoring his global ready-to-wear (RTW) in multi-season drops, Sabyasachi decouples his brand from both the erratic global weather calendar and the expectations of the Indian wedding season, capturing year-round high-margin sales.
Anamika Khanna has been switching heavy outerwear and traditional dupattas for years now (more on that later). Through her RTW label AK-OK, she sells denim and silk coats designed for year-round layering rather than weather protection.
Tarun Tahiliani's pieces are moving towards eliminating heavy shoulder pads and thick canvas interlinings, and often rely on precision draping and sheer capes that transition well from cool indoor venues to warmer outdoors.
Indie RTW design houses such as Bodice and Kanika Goyal are using unlined handloom fabrics like khadi, chanderi, and raw silk to create structured jackets that sell continuously in London, Tokyo, and major hubs without relying on a Fall/Winter label.
Where's the gap in luxury buying?
Something interesting happened in Paris this June. Luxury giant LVMH faced scrutiny after its flagship label Louis Vuitton built a rather big artificial waterfall for Paris Fashion Week, as the French capital grappled with a record-breaking heatwave. It's not just about water waste but also about being out of the loop with what your consumers are living through.
An LVMH spokesperson asserted no water was wasted and was redirected back into Paris' sewer system via a closed-loop system. But let's be real, it's about the messaging. It's quite daft to erect a colossal water structure in a city with a record of 40.9C that saw a shocking number of drowning deaths nationwide as people entered unauthorised rivers, lakes, ponds, and reservoirs to escape record-breaking temperatures. Being a fashion capital doesnt exempt Paris from the climate crisis.
A 2022 study from the Hot or Cool Institute says that Western consumers can only afford, within planetary boundaries, to buy 5 newly made garments a year. Emma Håkansson, founding director of Collective Fashion Justice, said in a National Geographic interview, "We used to make clothing that was tailored specifically to a person, and they wore that clothing for years. Now we have 52, if not more, “micro seasons” in the fashion world."
Saint Laurent, Gucci, and Bottega Veneta have already begun ditching or flattening rigid seasonal drops. The deadstock trap is very real. 55% of retailers reported increased unsold seasonal inventory due to unpredictable weather patterns in 2023, as per a 2024 Bain & Company report. 60% of consumers expect considered brands to offer trans-seasonal garments suitable for varied climates, according to a 2025 WGSN Consumer Trend Forecast.
Western luxury houses are getting caught with millions of dollars in unpurchased, heavy Fall/Winter inventory. This leads to aggressive markdowns, burning unsold stock, or massive carbon footprints to move products around. Heavy seasonal coats have become a major financial and environmental liability.
The future Is climate-responsive
Ultimately, the slow death of the seasonal coat is a financial reckoning. It shows a burgeoning gap which grew over time because of a core disconnect in global fashion.
For retailers, stocking heavy, single-climate outerwear in a warming world is a high-risk gamble. When an unseasonably warm autumn suppresses heavy coat sales, department stores face a choice: hold deadstock in expensive warehouses or take margin-killing markdowns.
Contemporary Indian fashion has always been solution-oriented, its design rooted in utility despite its festive output. Anamika Khanna noticed modern women at winter weddings ditching their dupattas entirely because they were cumbersome. She came up with cape dresses, open-front embroidered silk dusters and ethnic fringed tops which don't call for a dupatta.
Rahul Mishra’s most critically acclaimed outerwear pieces, his sweeping botanical trench coats, are engineered out of featherlight organza, sheer net, and thousands of hours of hand-stitched zardozi embroidery.
Indian design philosophy and production cycles are simply more responsive to the realities of our topography. Honestly, it's a big lesson for global bigwigs.
In June, Paris Fashion Week became an almost absurd illustration of the existing market disconnect: temperatures approached 40°C, Dior moved its show from 2.30pm to 9am and Rick Owens brought his forward from 12.30pm to 10am. Guests arrived armed with fans, ice packs and parasols, while models were dressed in heavy puffers.
In an email to attendees, Owens spoke about training: “We are all processing menace, some of us arm, some of us train.”
"The calendar does not make any sense,” Dior’s Jonathan Anderson was quoted saying by WWD, in reference to erratic delivery cycles and a business that bears no relation to the season outside.
In India, this isn't a theoretical future. The winter of 2025 was the warmest on record since 1901, with temperatures in January and February running 0.98°C and 1.36°C above the long-term average respectively. IMD's 1901–2025 data also shows a long-term winter warming trend of 0.77°C per century.
Europe is experiencing the same disruption. The winter of 2024–25 was Europe's joint second-warmest on record, 1.46°C above the 1991–2020 average, while the area experiencing freezing winter days is shrinking.
This doesn't mean winter disappears, or that nobody will need a coat. The long, predictable winter that once demanded a heavy outerwear investment is shrinking.
Honestly, what the business asks for is more honesty and more realism, in terms of consumption, waste and conscious solutions. The historical contract between nature and design, which was once a point of confidence, has been irrevocably broken.
This asks for reevaluation; hypocrisy has very little to offer to a climate-resilient future. It feels fitting to quote Rick Owens at this point, considering his commitment to tactile honesty. In a 2019 interview about his sneaker line, Owens addressed the need for mindfulness in fashion consumption.
"At this point, I’ve probably poisoned the earth more than I could personally replace, but maybe I can be a voice suggesting there are new, better ways to consume. Beyond the ecological responsibility, it’s about being more thoughtful and more considerate about everything we buy, and that’s an attitude I totally endorse," said Owens
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