"Art has always imbued in me a sense of purpose. For me, couture is the medium on which I express myself as an artist."
Art found Manish Gupta before fashion did. A self-acquired fluency in sketching and painting, paired with his family's 70-year legacy in the wholesale cloth business, quietly set the course for what was to come — a course that found its true direction the day he walked into NIFT, Delhi.
It was there that an inherent dexterity for detail revealed itself. The feel of a fabric, the way it falls, the construction beneath a garment's surface — these came to him not as lessons, but as instinct.
What followed was a decade shaped by range: design work for export houses, freelance collaborations with advertising agencies and film production houses, costumes for television serials, telefilms, exhibitions, and stage shows, and quiet, personal work — customizing pieces for friends and family who trusted his eye before the world did. That trust became a vocation.
But designing to everyone else's brief has a cost — and Manish felt it. He stepped away from commissioned work to showcase what he could really do, staging shows during Delhi's runway week that became, by every account, the most talked-about of the season. What followed was EKAM — two seasons at Lakme Fashion Week, the Grazia Award for Best Urban Designer of the Year (2017), and a client list that includes Ranveer Singh, Sushant Singh Rajput, Parineeti Chopra, Ayushman Khurana, Kajol, and Varun Dhawan. Today, EKAM retails from India's most respected multi-designer stores — Aashni+Co, Aza, Ogaan, Carma, and Aura among them.
On starting a movement
"Fashion is the art of dressing to one's own expression of life — it becomes a movement when it catches up with the masses."
For Manish, the most tired instinct in fashion is imitation without understanding — following an icon without knowing why a look works, or whether it works for you. His mission has never been trend-chasing. It's clarity: knowing what genuinely suits the person wearing it, and building from there.
Why MG Studio, why now
After a decade spent building EKAM into a name that redefined Indian womenswear, Manish is turning that same discipline toward a category close to where he began — bespoke menswear, built for a generation that wants sophistication without noise.
MG Studio is that answer: the best fabric available, construction with zero shortcuts, and silhouettes — the two-piece suit, the tuxedo, the Jodhpuri, the sherwani — designed the way Manish has always designed: with restraint, precision, and enough artistic instinct that the details speak before he has to.
Every garment at MG Studio is designed under Manish Gupta's direct creative direction, tailored to the individual, and finished by hand.