Wear Worthy India

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Men’s Fashion Gap in India: Opportunities Ahead

He travels more, grooms more, goes out more and photographs himself more than any generation before him. So why is he still shopping from a rack built in 2015?

Walk into any large-format store in a Delhi or Bengaluru mall and count what’s actually on the menswear floor. Graphic tees, work shirts, slim fit chinos and those same slim and straight fit denims in five washes. Somewhere near the back, a kurta section that doubles up in October and shrinks from December till July .

Now look at the man buying it and understand how his preferences have started to change…

In the last decade he has picked up a skincare routine, a passport with stamps on it, a weekend full of house parties, a group chat that organises three-day short trips to goa and Rishikesh, and an Instagram grid his female partner maintains for him. He now has opinions on silhouettes and fashion trends. He knows what a boxy fit is because he’s watched a hundred reels explaining it.

Metro man has changed almost entirely but most of the shop floor has stayed the same.

This gap is now a significant unclaimed opportunity for growth in Indian fashion.

Part 1: What actually changed

India’s experience economy has stopped being a holiday-only phenomenon. The Alive Experience Economy Report 2025 recorded spending on experiences growing roughly 90 times year-on-year, with the shift most visible in urban markets where curated experiences are displacing conventional leisure. McKinsey’s work on travel and experiences puts the generational split starkly: around 52% of Gen Z say they splurge on experiences, against roughly 29% of boomers. Discretionary spend is being reallocated — men are cutting back on grocery brands to free up money for travel, live events and dining out.

Modern Man travels a lot, according to the Ministry of Tourism’s Annual Tourism Snapshot, 32.7 million Indians travelled abroad in 2025, up from 30.89 million in 2024 and 27.88 million in 2023. Industry projections put 2026 at 40–44 million trips. Crucially, this isn’t all business: leisure accounted for 42.52% of foreign departures by Indians in 2024. Domestically, Goa alone crossed one crore domestic tourist arrivals in 2025.

Now think about what that means for a wardrobe. A man who takes four short-haul trips and two resort holidays a year needs clothes for: a 6am airport, a Bangkok night out, a Maldives lunch, a goa sundowner, a Jaipur wedding sangeet, a villa weekend near the city.

Euromonitor put India’s men’s grooming retail sales at ₹1,863 crore-scale growth in 2025 — INR 186.3 billion in retail sales, growing 9% in value, continuing a run of high single-digit and double-digit growth since 2020. Men’s skincare specifically has grown nearly 60% in three years. Global search interest for “men skincare routine” grew 857% over five years. Skincare is now the single largest segment of Indian men’s grooming.

The vocabulary shift matters more than the sales figures. Niacinamide, hyaluronic acid, retinol and peptides are now words in ordinary men’s language. A man who has learned to evaluate a serum by its actives has learned to evaluate a product on specification. He will soon apply exactly that literacy to a garment , its weight, fabric composition, construction, count to understand the overall quality.

India is Instagram’s largest single-country audience, with roughly 481 million users as of late 2025, and around 500 million social media user identities overall. Men are the majority of that Indian user base. Every dinner, every trip, every haircut now has a documentation layer. Clothes are no longer only worn, they are photographed, and a garment that looks flat on camera or is not in trend fails to meet expectation.

Put those four together and you get a specific person who is an urban Indian man, 22 to 40, who has more occasions in a month than his father had in a year, who is comfortable spending on how he looks, and who has been trained by the algorithm to recognize good design instantly and has a partner who wants him to look good next to her.

Part 2: What the market offers him instead

Indian Menswear market was valued at roughly USD 21.9 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit USD 42.4 billion by 2034.

Lets segment the market by product and it’s still trousers, denim, shirts, t-shirts and ethnicwear — the same five buckets that have defined the category for two decades. Ethnicwear alone is projected at USD 26.9 billion by FY26 across menswear and womenswear, the largest slice of India’s garment industry.

India’s D2C fashion boom of the last five years — over USD 5 billion raised across 520+ deals since 2021 — produced a wave of genuinely well-run entry-price-point menswear businesses. Snitch is the standout: roughly ₹520 crore in FY25 revenue, 100+ stores, all built on a read-and-react model that tests 50–100 styles a week and kills losers in 72 hours. Rare Rabbit crossed ₹600 crores and is already profitable.

These are real companies solving a real problem.Below ₹3,000, an Indian man has more choice than he’s ever had. Though there is still a gap in the premium segment for a well-travelled 35-40-year-old with disposable income that actually wants to shop. And above that, the handful of Indian labels producing world-class menswear are largely selling abroad.

Part 3: The fit problem nobody wants to own

India has never had a standardised body-size chart. The apparel industry here has run for decades on size charts that are, in the words of the NIFT researchers who finally fixed this, “largely tweaked versions of size charts of other countries” — created out of manufacturer instinct rather than measurement. In D2C specifically, apparel return rates sit at 20–30%, which is exactly where thin fashion margins go to die.

The government’s INDIA size project finally scanned over 25,000 Indians across six regions, completed the survey in 2023, and produced 27 body-size charts — 13 for women and 14 for men — covering three height groups and five body shapes. Those charts have been available online since January and we hope that brands are looking at that data seriously.

Which brings us to the international fast-fashion brands like Zara that runs small and slim; the upper end of the range thins out fast, and the range that does exist is cut for a body that isn’t the median Indian one. An Indian man who is 5’8″ with a 40″ chest and a shorter torso-to-leg ratio will find that a size L is tight across the chest and simultaneously long in the sleeve and the rise. He then concludes that he is wrong — and either buys nothing, or buys up a size and wears something that hangs badly.

Every conversation about “Indian men don’t experiment with fashion” should start here. A large number of them have simply never worn a garment that fits them properly. It’s hard to develop taste in silhouette when nothing on offer sits on your shoulders correctly.

Part 4: Womenswear ran ahead. Menswear stayed put.

Here’s the comparison that makes the menswear gap impossible to ignore.

Over the last five years, Indian womenswear has had a genuine design renaissance. New labels arrived at every price point with actual points of view: sculptural draping, deconstructed sarees, gender-fluid tailoring, size-inclusive ranges running XXS to 5XL, occasion wear that isn’t lehenga-or-nothing. A woman shopping in India today can find a label that shares her specific aesthetic, whether that’s minimal, maximal, craft-led, or avant-garde, at roughly the price she wants to pay.

Part of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy inside the industry. The received wisdom is that men are low-frequency, low-experimentation shoppers, so brands build low-risk assortments, so men have nothing to experiment with, so purchase frequency stays low, so the wisdom is confirmed. Everyone in the loop is behaving rationally and the loop stays active.

Part 5: The most damning statistic in Indian menswear

In June 2025, Kartik Research became the first Indian label on the official Paris Fashion he clothes are made in India, from handwoven Indian textiles, by Indian artisans.

Read that again, because it summarises the entire structural problem. India is now producing menswear good enough to sit in Dover Street Market and SSENSE. It is producing it here, with our craft, in our factories. And the Indian man cannot easily buy it, because the domestic retail and distribution infrastructure is not built for stylish men’s clothing.

We are exporting our own menswear renaissance and importing Zara.

Part 6: Twelve brands actually doing the work

There are some labels working in this direction. They are just scattered, under-distributed and under-covered. Here is a starting map across five price tiers. (Price bands are indicative and move with the collection.)

Entry (roughly ₹1,000–2,500)

Snitch — What makes Snitch genuinely interesting isn’t the price, their consumer is trend-literate, camera-aware, and the brand is increasingly willing to put a boxy or a pleated silhouette on the floor before anyone else at this price.

Six5Six Street — Hip-hop and street-culture led, with bold graphics, oversized silhouettes and socially pointed messaging.

Mid (roughly ₹2500–4000)

Rare Rabbit — The most commercially successful attempt at “elevated everyday” in Indian menswear. their designs are contemporary, restrained, decent fabric quality relative to price and a range of interesting prints

Premium (roughly ₹4000–7000)

AUDA — They are trying to bridge the gap between traditional ethnic clothing and predictable Western tailoring, working with fluid fabrics, contemporary designs that hold up equally well at a party or on a resort vacation. We noticed premium fabrics, intricate embroidery and interesting collar shapes , overall a good attempt at occasion wear for modern man.

ITOH — Indian and Japanese aesthetics folded together into relaxed, classic silhouettes. The kind of quiet, well-cut clothing that men in this bracket keep asking for and rarely find domestically.

Super-premium (roughly ₹10,000+)

Almost Gods — Founded by Dhruv Khurana. Streetwear built on storytelling — mythology, art and social commentary run through the graphics and embroidery. Maximalist without being loud for its own sake.

Jaywalking— Deliberate destruction, asymmetry, high-saturation palettes, DIY construction. Not for everyone, which is exactly the point, and a rare Indian brand where the design is the reason to buy.

Kartik Research — The most globally significant Indian menswear label operating today. Every textile except leather is handwoven in India; roughly 85% of fabrics are developed exclusively for the brand. Slow, craft-led, and pointedly uninterested in romanticising poverty as an aesthetic.

HARAGO — Launched in 2019. A luxurious reading of resort wear — hand-painted and beaded silk shirts, appliqué trousers — produced with artisan groups across Gujarat, Assam and West Bengal. Perfectly aimed at exactly the resort-and-destination-wedding calendar the modern Indian man now lives on.

Dhruv Kapoor — Founded in 2013 to break gender norms through fearless design, and showing at Milan Fashion Week since 2022. One of the few Indian designers with a sustained international runway presence in menswear.

Couture

Amit Aggarwal — His menswear treats a bandhgala as an engineering problem rather than a heritage template, and it’s the strongest argument going that Indian occasion wear can be futuristic instead of nostalgic.

What the opportunity actually is

The brief for anyone building menswear in India right now is not complicated:

Build for the ₹3000–5,000 gap. It is the widest hole in the market and the one with the most disposable income sitting behind it.

Design for the occasion calendar he actually has — resort, travel, going out, weekend, wedding-guest — not the office-and-festival calendar the industry still assumes.

Use the Indian block. INDIAsize is done, published and free. Cutting to actual Indian proportions is now a solved problem for anyone willing to do the pattern work, and it’s the single fastest route to lower returns and higher repeat rates.

Extend the size range upward. The Indian male body above a 42″ chest is not an edge case; it is a very large, very underserved, very solvent segment that international fast fashion has functionally abandoned here.

Give him a silhouette, not a slogan. He has already seen the global reference. He doesn’t need to be educated. He needs to be sold something that matches what’s on his screen.

The Indian man has spent a decade becoming a more interesting customer. The industry has spent those ten years selling him the same cotton satin work shirt. We hope that more labels try to fix this gap soon.

Wear Worthy covers the fashion industry from the factory floor to the front row. If you’re building in this space — or you think we’ve got something wrong — write in.

Sources

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