For 431-88, a wardrobe has never been limited to clothes. The brand’s latest project, Apartment 88, takes that idea into a physical space, bringing together fashion, art, design and objects. Conceived as a travelling space, the project comes to life in designer Shweta Kapur’s Delhi home, alongside the brand’s F/W ’26 collection, Biophilia. It is the first of Kapur’s fashion retail experiments to use her home as a setting, and she hopes to see how the concept can travel and take on different forms in other spaces.
In conversation with Shweta Kapur.
This is your home. What made you decide it could also become an exhibition space for your fashion?
I’ve always felt that the clothes I make don’t exist in isolation. They are part of a larger world of references, objects, materials, books, images and everyday life. So bringing them into my home felt very natural.
Apartment-88 came from the idea of giving 431-88 a physical form, but in a way that felt more like entering a world than walking into a conventional fashion space. This is where I live and work, so it felt very honest to let people experience the clothes within that context.
Have you seen this done elsewhere? By someone else?
There are definitely people and spaces that have blurred the boundaries between fashion, art, design and domestic spaces, and I’ve always found that very interesting. But Apartment-88 is really rooted in my own relationship with this particular home and the way I work.
It wasn’t about recreating something I had seen elsewhere. It was more about asking what would happen if we allowed the 431-88 world to exist within a home, and let the home become part of the conversation.
Was there anything you absolutely refused to move or change for the Apartment-88 set up?
I didn’t want to make the home feel like a set. The idea was to work with what already existed rather than completely transform it for the occasion.
There were certain things that I wanted to remain exactly as they were because they belong to the everyday life of this space. I wanted Apartment-88 to feel like a natural extension of the home, rather than something temporarily imposed on it.
What did you want someone to feel like in the first 10 seconds?
I wanted them to feel like they had entered someone’s home, rather than walked into a fashion presentation.
There should be a sense of curiosity that you want to look around, open something, notice an object, discover a garment. I wanted the experience to unfold slowly rather than tell you immediately what you were supposed to be looking at.
Published – October 02, 2026 06:30 pm IST
