Before Colombo had a fashion week, and much before sustainable fashion became a buzzword-riddled marketing category anyone could buy into, Ajai Vir Singh often argued that a country famous for making other people’s clothes could also be trusted with its own name on the label.
Through the years, Singh, who went to Sri Lanka as an expatriate in the 90s, eyed a nascent market with a relatively modest pool of contemporary designers and built a fashion week. Everything Colombo Fashion Week (CFW) has tried to become since — a South Asian design hub, a sustainability showcase, and now a BRICS-adjacent cultural platform — is built on the belief that a manufacturing economy can also be a moral axis of mindful style.
Ajai Vir Singh argued that a country famous for making other people’s clothes could also be trusted with its own name on the label.
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Earlier this year, as I sat through the shows at CFW’s latest edition, this future-forward ethos was apparent. But it also left me a little apprehensive about the future of such exceptional talent. Unlike India and its fashion weeks with hefty production budgets, how would they get the attention they deserve? More importantly, why were fashion insiders not talking about Sri Lanka with more fervour yet?
“In Colombo, you may see a designer’s collection that was created for the ramp, and that’s likely the end of it. There’s not necessarily an extension waiting,” says Annika Fernando, who has run the cult multi-brand store Paradise Road in the island country for close to 15 years. “A designer here might make and sell just six dresses a month.” Most local designers offer one-off pieces and produce them in small runs.
Annika Fernando runs the cult multi-brand store Paradise Road in Colombo
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What reframes the story
Sri Lanka’s own garment factories, the same ones producing for behemoths such as Nike and Victoria’s Secret at an industrial scale, aren’t built to handle a local designer’s 15-piece batch. Fernando explains that the factories are calibrated for global brands’ volumes and, due to other restrictions in place, stops local designers from tapping into the same production line.
Women busy within a textile factory in Colombo
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That’s the paradox around which I kept circling. An island with more garment manufacturing infrastructure than anywhere else in South Asia (its apparel export value per capita is approximately $242, according to the Sri Lanka Department of Census & Statistics, and direct garment-sector jobs per capita stand at roughly 1 per 63 residents, according to a report by the U.S. International Trade Administration) cannot provide adequate support for its own designers to scale. Ironically, however, that’s also what allows Colombo to function more like an atelier culture than a retail pipeline.
Strong domestic market
Meanwhile, the other problem that has been holding Sri Lanka back seems to be solving itself. Indian designer Rajesh Pratap Singh, who was a part of CFW this year, is blunt about what Colombo needs: “A strong domestic market that is independent of markets outside.” India’s fashion industry has had decades and a billion-plus population’s headstart on domestic demand, but Sri Lanka’s 22 million are only now starting to buy local in a big way. (A surge in national pride, positive economic shifts, and a design renaissance that is respectful of the past yet daringly visionary are helping this.)
Rajesh Pratap Singh is blunt about what Colombo needs: “A strong domestic market that is independent of markets outside.”
CFW director Fazeena Rajabdeen says roughly 90% of the style-conscious crowd wear Sri Lankan labels today, against what she describes as near-zero 20 years ago, when everyone at fashion week “would be wearing an international brand to see a show full of local labels”.
CFW director Fazeena Rajabdeen says roughly 90% of the style-conscious crowd wear Sri Lankan labels today
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Don’t get it twisted; Sri Lanka is far more than its struggles. If India’s fashion imagination runs towards abundance — embellishments, embroidery — Sri Lanka’s runs towards a modern yet rooted restraint. Nearly everyone I speak to describes that restraint as a design philosophy rather than what many might perceive as a limitation. “We’re not as textile-rich as India,” says Fernando. “That’s not our greatest strength.” She traces it back to a talk she attended in Mumbai, where the consensus was that Sri Lankan design is defined by conscious editing and a pared-back aesthetic, which can be tied directly to the island’s other exports, like its tropical-modernist architecture — the Geoffrey Bawa lineage of clean lines built for heat and light. Fashion’s version of the same logic is pared back, a little raw, “a little less ready for the expectations of bulk international retail, maybe”. And that untreated quality, in Fernando’s words, is the charm.
The craft doing most of the talking is batik. The wax-resist dyeing arrived via Dutch colonial trade routes around the turn of the 19th century, originating in what is now Indonesia, and then evolved, much as it did in India, into something specifically local. Darshi Keerthisena of Buddhi Batiks describes Sri Lankan batik as shaped by “generations of knowledge, patience, and a distinctly Sri Lankan sensibility” — not something she’s interested in scaling to compete with India’s embroidery traditions or Bangladesh’s handloom.
A design from Buddhi Batiks
A cultural cocktail
Where Colombo’s silhouettes diverge most obviously from its counterparts across South Asia, is occasion. Bridal and heavy occasion wear (the commercial engine of Indian fashion weeks) is far less central here; what dominates instead is resort and everyday wear built for a chic coastal life. “Our goal is to juxtapose aspirational, whimsical pieces against these landscapes that look like you’re in a picture book. So, the clothes and the coastline are given equal footing,” says Radhika Perera-Hernandez of Lois London and King and Lois. She was born in London, grew up in New York and is now proudly producing her brands in her motherland, Sri Lanka.
Another distinction: the batik-via-Dutch-Indonesia route is a useful reminder that Sri Lanka’s design language sits, as it always has, at a meeting point of Indian Ocean trade. With Arab and South Indian merchants, then Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisers. Colombo promotes and nurtures this cultural cocktail, showing the likes of Pakistani designer Rizwan Beyg, whose embroidery initiative, Bunyaad, sources its entire label from 250 rural women artisans. Or Chinese designer Ji Cheng, who showing her ‘Floating Plume’ collection at CFW this year, went home to Shanghai after CFW with batik samples and a plan to fold Sri Lankan patterning into her work after Chinese buyers and colleagues kept asking where to buy the “Indian pieces” she’d picked up in Colombo.
Designs by Pakistani designer Rizwan Beyg
None of this reads like a lesser Paris or Milan playing catch-up, but a different kind of network that is South-South rather than South-facing-West. Beyg sees CFW as one of the few live attempts to decolonise and modify South Asian fashion’s perception of itself without auditioning for Western approval.
‘Buyers want what they don’t recognise’
All of this might sound great in theory, but the romance and revolution of an alternative platform will only hold if someone is paying for the clothes. Perera-Hernandez’s Lois London wholesales to boutiques and resort chains across the Caribbean and South America and (since she relocated the business to Colombo in 2018) has built a loyal Sri Lankan customer base. Payal Pratap, one of two Indian designers to show at CFW this year, has retailed at Paradise Road for years and says the fashion week itself has become secondary to a clientele that “look[s] forward to new things from the brand”. She is now weighing a menswear line and a denim collection built for the Sri Lankan weather.
Every one of the last 20 years handed Sri Lanka a plausible excuse to stay a regional footnote: civil war, the 2019 Easter attacks, COVID, and a 2022 economic collapse severe enough to topple a government. That none of it killed the fashion week is the resilience story CFW has always told about itself. What’s different in 2026 is that the tailwinds have finally lined up with that story instead of testing it. Tourism is recovering with open borders. The BRICS International Fashion Federation partnership gave this year’s edition its first genuinely cross-continental platform and international press it hadn’t attracted before.
Globally, the market has caught up to what Colombo was already doing by necessity — in line with Fernando’s observation that “buyers now want what they don’t instantly recognise” over a logo they do, which is really a description of the same appetite driving interest in slow, artisanal production everywhere. Sri Lanka just never had the industrial scale to do fashion any other way.
The Mumbai-based writer, artist and editor reports on fashion and culture.