Fourteen years after founding HUEMN (pronounced “human”) in 2012—an award-winning label often credited with bringing the streetwear movement to India—Pranav Kirti Misra launches another homegrown clothing brand.

Eponymously drawing from his own last name, Misraa is the designer’s most personal expression till date. Born and raised in Lucknow, each silhouette is inspired by the bylanes of his hometown. It was his beginnings as a young boy farming in his village during the summer holidays—playing with a tire and wearing a lungi covered in mud—where the roots of Misraa lie. Having been in the fashion industry for over decade and a half, the exclusionary nature of the space was deeply apparent to him and thus, stepping away from the chaos of it all, Misra ‘found’ the kurta, and in it, Misraa: a deep source of comfort in a torn world. 

A graduate of the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Bangalore, Pranav has always been an outlier. In the digital world, most of his followers know of him as a published Hindi poet and writer, rather than a designer. It is this world where Misraa stems from and rests in. By its very nature, the label questions the meaning of ‘streetwear’ in India: recalling the kurta as the garment that has birthed from the streets of South Asia and re-positioning it as such. A redefinition of the kurta’s utility, and its gaze is intended—to see it replacing the t-shirt as a garment for the Everyday and Everyman/woman.

Centred on the concept of ‘People, Places and Poetry’, Misraa finds its relevance in the quiet craft, clarity and conscience in a time of visual noise: it’s a brand that sits at the bridge of prose and poetry, of garment and wearer. The brand’s logo too is a one and a half star, an inconspicuous motif quietly embroidered onto a sleeve here and a pocket there—the intention being to always strive for the remaining three and a half. Pranav’s father, a famed poet too, once wrote, “Sapne lekar aaye the, poora karke jayenge” and it is the sentiment which once drove him and now sits at the core of Misraa. It's a world built for the dreamers, who won’t rest before turning their aspirations into their realities.