Across stage and studio: Shivani Kokkonda is defining what it means to be a designer today

Shivani Kokkonda’s creative life spans more than disciplines — it spans generations, geographies, and materials. As a costume designer, fashion artisan, and storyteller through crafted design, she resists categorization. Whether designing for performance, building a sustainable brand, or painting onto a garment by hand, Kokkonda threads cultural memory into every piece she makes.

In 2024, she launched So We Meet Again, a personal fashion and jewelry brand built exclusively around handmade work. Each item is crafted solely by Kokkonda herself. Her approach is rooted in tradition but defined by reinterpretation, offering garments and accessories that resonate with personal and collective histories.

«I have intentionally shaped my career around blending disciplines — fashion, costume, fine arts, and heritage craft», she says. «It is about what stories these creations carry with them beyond what we wear or perform with».

A personal legacy, recrafted

Kokkonda’s connection to craft is rooted in her family’s long-standing goldsmithing tradition. Growing up around these practices gave her an early appreciation for detail, ornamentation, and the cultural value embedded in handmade objects. Rather than inherit the craft as it was, she chose to reinterpret it on her own terms, merging it with her background in fine arts and fashion to create something that reflects her personal and political values.

«I see my work as a continuation of that legacy — reshaped to reflect the world I live in and the people I want to include», she says. «It’s not about nostalgia. It’s about creating space for new voices within evolving traditions». 

So We Meet Again, her fashion and jewelry brand, carries forward this ethos. Each piece is entirely handmade by Kokkonda, featuring techniques like miniature painting and hand embroidery that transform garments and accessories into intimate, expressive forms. These intricate details are reserved for her fashion practice and intentionally kept out of her costume work, allowing each to remain distinct and focused.

Stitching a multidisciplinary future

Kokkonda earned her Bachelor’s degree in fashion design from the National Institute of Fashion Technology in India, followed by a Master’s in Costume Design for Performance at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. This dual education gave her a balanced view of clothing as both an intimate part of daily life and a tool for storytelling within performance spaces.

Her master’s project, Lost Soul, stands as a compelling synthesis of her methods. It explored the intersections of textile art, costume design, and performance through a series of large-scale, hand-painted textile landscapes. Each textile —depicting imagery such as stormy skies, ocean depths, and blooming fields —embodied a distinct emotional state: fear, hope, joy, solace, and liberation. Rather than remain static, these landscapes transformed into wearable garments through zero-waste pattern cutting, enabling them to move and evolve with the performer’s body.

The project narrated an emotional journey and challenged conventional boundaries between environment and costume, reimagining textile waste as an opportunity. «Each piece is an embodiment of emotion,” she says, «with textures and color transitions acting as metaphors for the inner voyage of a ‘lost soul’ seeking clarity and peace».

Beyond academic projects, Kokkonda continues to draw insight from traditional knowledge systems. Her research focuses on textile techniques from India and other parts of Asia, where sustainability is often embedded in centuries-old practices. She repositions these methods within modern design contexts, asking how craft, particularly slow, handmade processes, can exist within today’s digitally accelerated world.

«Costume design taught me how to think about garments in relation to movement, space, and narrative», she explains. «Fashion design taught me to consider intimacy, the daily relationship people have with what they wear. When I create now, it always occurs at the intersection of these ideas».

When the digital meets the handmade

A recent project, still in development, reflects that exact intersection. Kokkonda is contributing to the Jamini Roy Volumetric Performance Project, an immersive, digitally captured performance designed in collaboration with XR Network+, London College of Fashion, and Nissen Richards Studio. Her role involves designing costumes that integrate traditional Indian embroidery into garments meant for volumetric capture — a cutting-edge 3D format used in virtual and augmented environments.

As part of the collaboration, she also led embroidery workshops for students, emphasizing the importance of keeping traditional hand techniques alive, even within technologically advanced formats.

«I wanted the garments to retain the soul of the hand that made them, even when viewed through a screen», she explains.

Emotion woven into every thread

«In every thread, every stitch, there lies a choice,” Shivani Kokkonda says. «Do we rush toward what comes next and forget what brought us here? Or do we find ways to weave the old stories into the new ones, so nothing ever truly disappears?»

This philosophy shapes every aspect of her practice. In a fashion world often consumed by pace and spectacle, she works slowly and deliberately. Her pieces are not mass-produced statements — they are personal, thoughtful, and grounded in care.

She defines luxury not through exclusivity but through emotional resonance. Each garment or costume carries meaning — memory-made material — inviting wearers into a deeper relationship with what they wear.

Over the years, Kokkonda has lent her vision to a number of collaborative projects in London — from designing for digitally captured performances with the London College of Fashion to conducting textile workshops that pass on endangered techniques to the next generation. Her thematic costume designs, which earned special mention at the Prague Quadrennial, reflect this devotion to process. But recognition is secondary. What drives her is the quiet labor of making — stitch by stitch, story by story — anchored in the belief that what we craft with intention can hold space for what matters most.

 

Byline: Astie Alindogan

Photo Courtesy of: Shivani Kokkonda

---