At Lakmē Fashion Week 2026, Mini Sondhi presented A Letter to My Father, a deeply personal collection rooted in grief. Moving through four stages – Chaos, Expression, Acceptance and Bloom – it traces an emotional journey through clothing, revealing a designer who often discovers what she feels through what she creates. For Sondhi, the process rarely begins with a fixed concept. Instead, the emotion comes first, and the collection finds its direction along the way.
“My mood is my mood board,” Sondhi says. While fashion often draws on visual references, cultural cues and carefully assembled inspiration boards, her starting point is far more instinctive. She describes her practice as that of an artist who creates to express an emotion, rather than one who begins with a theme and works towards it. A painting she made when she felt particularly stuck became an expression of the chaos that preceded this collection. There was no elaborate plan behind it. She simply began painting, allowing the feeling to lead.
“I don’t go looking out for design inspiration. I wait for it to come to me in the form of emotion.”
Of the collection’s four stages, Acceptance, represented by blue, proved the most challenging to translate into clothing. Sondhi says, “When you’re in the dark phase, when you’re in the chaos, anything that hurts and has hurt for a really long time comes out very naturally because it’s just flowing out of you, and you’re so deeply involved with it.”
Sondhi and her team worked with leftover yarn, fabric and cuttings from previous collections, finding ways to put these materials to use again. “We’ve been consuming our own waste,” she explains, describing how fabric left over from earlier cutwork was used to create textured embroidery. Hand embroidery adds another layer to the pieces, and Sondhi feels it is something best seen up close. As she puts it, the textures and three-dimensional effects “cannot be explained in words but can be witnessed in person.”
For Sondhi, the real work lies in staying honest with herself, allowing each collection to take shape before she fully understands what it has to say. With A Letter to My Father, she turns a deeply personal experience into something that can be felt beyond her own story. It is a reminder that fashion can do more than communicate an idea; it can give form to emotions that are otherwise difficult to articulate. It is a sentiment that comes to define not just this collection, but Sondhi’s approach to design itself!
“For me, design is just a catalyst through which I express.”