In FY25, H&M’s India business booked ₹3,595 crore in revenue. Zara — operating here through its joint venture with Tata’s Trent — did ₹2,782 crore. Marks & Spencer India came in at ₹1,537 crore and Uniqlo, the newest arrival, grew 44% to ₹1,175 crore, which is the number I’d be watching if I ran an Indian apparel brand.
That is a very large amount of Indian money, spent by Indian people, in Indian malls.
Now ask the question nobody asks at the till: where were those clothes made?
The loop
Global fast fashion runs on a sourcing map, and India sits fairly low on it.
These Brands are among the largest buyers in Bangladesh’s ready-made garment industry — an industry that spent twenty years building precisely what they need. Vast volume. Low unit cost. Duty advantages into Europe. A labour cost structure India cannot match and, arguably, should not want to.
So the loop runs like this.
Fabric is bought from China, shirt is cut and stitched in Dhaka. It moves through a distribution network. It’s sold in a mall in Gurgaon to someone paying in rupees.
The garment worker’s wage stays in Bangladesh. The mill’s margin stays in Bangladesh or China. The design, sourcing and brand margin — the fat part, the part that compounds — goes back to Stockholm, or A Coruña, or London.
What stays in India is the retail layer. Store leases, store staff, local marketing, GST.
Those are real jobs and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But it’s the thinnest slice of the value chain, and it’s the slice that builds the least. The parts that create industrial capability — spinning, weaving, dyeing, cutting, stitching, design, brand equity — are happening somewhere else.
One of the largest textile-producing countries on the planet is quietly becoming a consumption market for garments made elsewhere.
Let us be fair about this for a moment
We don’t think there are villains in this story, and we get suspicious of writing that needs one.
These companies are doing what every company does: sourcing efficiently, serving demand, employing thousands of people here. They didn’t do anything to India. They offered a product and Indians bought a lot of it.
And “buy Indian” is a slogan that falls apart the second you inspect it, because plenty of Indian-owned brands import fabric, manufacture abroad, and sell you a poly-blend with a Sanskrit name. Ownership isn’t provenance. Anyone selling you that equivalence is selling you something.
So the argument we are actually making is narrower, and we think harder to dismiss:
A decade of ₹1,299 shirts has taught an entire generation of Indian consumers that clothes are cheap, disposable, and not worth thinking about — and that belief is the thing suffocating the domestic industry, not the foreign brands themselves.
What that belief does downstream
Picture an Indian brand trying to build something good.
It has no global sourcing scale, so its fabric costs more per metre. It has no mall anchor tenancy, so it either hands 25–35% to a marketplace or burns the same money on performance ads. It can’t spread design costs across forty countries. And it faces a customer who has been trained — by exactly the shirts above — to think ₹3,000 is expensive for a shirt.
So the founder faces a choice that isn’t really a choice. Cheapen the product to hit ₹1,499, or hold the quality and get called overpriced by people who’ve never held the fabric.
Most cheapen it. That’s how you get an Indian market flooded with Indian brands selling the same Surat polyester as everyone else, at the same price, with better copywriting.
A few don’t. And here’s what I genuinely didn’t expect to find when I started paying attention: the ones who didn’t are now producing better work than the imports.
Not equivalent. Better. Because fast fashion is structurally incapable of small runs, complex handwork, or fabric that costs real money — and that’s exactly the space where Indian design has an unfair advantage it isn’t using.
The brands we would actually redirect the money to
Not a patriotic list. Things I think are genuinely better than what you’d buy instead.
If you’re replacing a fast-fashion basics habit — The Souled Store , Zudio- They built a large graphics and casualwear business entirely on its own terms, speaking to an Indian audience rather than translating a European season. The fits have matured a lot. The prices sit exactly where H&M’s do. There’s no sacrifice here, which is the point.
If you want everyday casuals that beat the Zara rack — Rare Rabbit. This is our clearest evidence that the design gap is gone. The printed viscose shirts and structured casuals are more interesting than the equivalent import, and usually better made.
And Allen Solly, the unfashionable pick that quietly wins on quality and fits. 60s and 70s count cotton shirting, manufactured here, owned here, at a price the imports can’t match on quality. Nobody posts about it. That’s fine.
If you want affordable designer wear — Auda. It’s doing the thing Indian fashion has needed someone to do for years, which is treat fabric as the product. The linens, jacquards and premium modal blends have a weight and hand that H&M and Zara cannot produce at mass scale.
Komal Kothari brings a genuinely Indian design vocabulary to contemporary silhouettes, with detailing that only survives in short runs. We love those black embellished shirts !
Dash and Dot has built a strong case in contemporary womenswear — clean, well-constructed, designed for Indian wardrobes rather than adapted into them.
And at the top, Countrymade and Asuka, where the conversation stops being about value and starts being about craft. Expensive, legibly so: fabric, technique, finishing, time, skilled hands. This is the tier where India isn’t competing with global fashion at all. It’s working in a space global fashion structurally cannot enter.
What we are actually asking
Nothing dramatic….not asking you to feel guilty in a Zara queue, and I’d distrust any article that did.
we are asking you to understand what the H&M ₹1999 shirt is. It’s a garment engineered to survive one season, made by someone in another country, priced to teach you that clothes don’t matter.
And the compounding effect of a decade of that isn’t just a worse wardrobe. It’s a domestic industry that can’t fund good design, can’t invest in better fabric, and can’t build brands that last thirty years — because the customer has been taught that a well-made shirt is a rip-off.
Buy four shirts a year instead of twelve. Buy good designs instead of basics wrapped under minimalism.
Check where they were made.
You will spend roughly the same amount of money and end up dressed considerably better, which is the least ideological argument we can make for it.
Tags: India, Fashion, Business, Retail, Manufacturing
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