Fashion is freedom: Pranav Kirti Misra does not merely cut fabric to fit the body but questions its context

THERE ARE DESIGNERS who make clothes, and then there are those who make arguments. Pranav Kirti Misra belongs to the latter—a creator who cuts fabric not merely to fit the body, but to question the frameworks we have inherited about it. Through HUEMN—a name that deliberately sounds like “human”—he has built a language of fashion that resists easy categorisation, one that insists on plurality in a world addicted to binaries.

Born in Lucknow and trained at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Misra is as much a writer as he is a designer. His garments read like text—layered, provocative, sometimes quiet, sometimes defiant. HUEMN’s work has always drawn from the social and political landscapes around it, refusing to isolate fashion from the world it inhabits. It is clothing that understands context.

His latest collection, with its kaftans, hybrid silhouettes and sculptural drapes, feels particularly urgent. The kaftan—so often reduced in contemporary imagination to resortwear— returns here as something else entirely. It becomes a site of negotiation: between structure and fluidity, between tradition and reinvention, between the body as it is and the body as society insists it should be.

In Misra’s hands, the kaftan is not escapist; it is declarative. It allows movement without apology, presence without performance. It does not cling or confine. It breathes. And in that breath, it creates space—for identity to be unlabelled, for expression to be unpoliced.

This is where HUEMN’s work becomes political without turning didactic. The unisex nature of the garments is not a trend-driven gesture, but a philosophical stance. Long before “gender-neutral” became a retail category, India’s own sartorial history was already fluid. Drapes, wraps, angavastrams, lungis, shawls—these were not policed by the rigid binaries that colonial frameworks later imposed.

The British did not just redraw maps; they redrew meanings. They codified, categorised, and compartmentalised, turning fluid cultures into fixed systems because binaries are easier to govern. Male and female. East and West. Formal and informal. Even in clothing, what was once a spectrum became a set of rules.

Misra’s work quietly dismantles that inheritance. His kaftans, kurta hybrids and inside-out constructions refuse to sit obediently within these categories. They are not “menswear” softened or “womenswear” simplified. They are garments that exist on their own terms—designed, deliberate, and deeply aware of their lineage.

There is also, unmistakably, a certain hip energy to HUEMN—a pulse that comes from streetwear and youth culture, from a refusal to take tradition too seriously while still respecting it. The brand has, over the years, moved from oversized silhouettes into more precise tailoring, but the attitude remains intact: irreverent yet informed, global yet rooted.

What makes these clothes compelling is not just how they look, but how they live. They are meant to be worn, inhabited, altered by the bodies that carry them. They gather stories. They respond to movement. They shift with the wearer’s mood

and moment. And perhaps that is the point.

In a country like India, where language itself resists singularity—where one sentence can hold multiple meanings, where identities overlap rather than exclude—fashion, too, must learn to speak in plurality. HUEMN understands this instinctively. It does not flatten difference; it frames it. It does not erase individuality; it allows it to coexist within a shared aesthetic vocabulary.

In that sense, Misra is not designing clothes so much as he is restoring a conversation— one that existed long before colonial binaries interrupted it. A conversation where masculinity and femininity were not opposites, but energies; where clothing was not a label, but a lived experience.

To wear HUEMN, then, is not just to wear a garment. It is to step into that in-between space—where identity is fluid, where creativity is unconstrained, and where fashion feels like freedom.