When Mischa Barton, Paris Hilton, Rihanna and Sarah McLachlan all step out into their glitzy globe-trotting lives wearing your designs, you’re entitled to a little smugness, but for Kanika Ahuja, whose Nikka New York label has appealed to a vast array of the famous and the fashionable, it’s more a sort of quiet satisfaction. “For me it’s not necessarily a celebrity that gives me the ‘it’ moment,” says the globe-trotting (think Mumbai-Delhi-New York) designer. “It is the usual people who carry my clothes beautifully and with panache who are a matter of pride for me.”

The spark of creative ambition first led her to the Philadelphia College of Textile Design and Engineering, after which Kanika helped her brother Arjun Saluja to launch the Rishta line, for which he is now justly revered. The buzz they created on the New York scene led Kanika to branch off into the ultra-edgy Nikka New York line. But the future is really now with her accessories label, Anaikka, recently launched in India, a line that grew out of Kanika’s “ever-growing love for architectural and industrial shapes and machinery. It’s rough around the edges, with a hint of harshness, and designed to provide grand solutions to simple clothing”. There is something unusual about Kanika’s wholehearted embrace of the craftsman’s eye for all things mechanical and detailed, and her incorporation of that into the fluid creativity of her art. But as Anaikka, she tells us, is about freshness and experimentation, it’s evident that the ideal Anaikka woman, in some sense, is not the world-famous celebutante – it’s Kanika herself.

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