BEST FOOT FORWARD
Festive dressing always has room for a showstopper pair of shoes. From hand-embroidered sneakers to cork-soled flats, these home-grown brands invite you to dress up without leaving
a heavy footprint behind
WORDS by ALISHA UVAIS
One no longer has to imagine fewer single-wear shoes gathering dust in the back of a cupboard. Instead, think of more pairs designed to be worn, danced in, and passed through several celebrations before they’re discarded. Festive footwear does not have to mean heels that punish you or ornate juttis that live in a box eleven months of the year. Comfort, conscience, and craft can all be on the same shoe rack. For anyone building a festive wardrobe this year, here’s where to look if your shopping list includes a pair of shoes that’s as thoughtful as it is dressed up.
COMFORT, COMPASSION & NO COMPROMISE
Most of us have been there: we eagerly want to celebrate with friends and family and join in the festivities, but our fancy footwear impedes us mid-thought. Would you find a corner at a wedding because your shoes will hurt or let loose and worry about the bites later? ChalJooti solves this dilemma by erasing it altogether. You can be as fancy as you want and dance to your heart’s content at the same time.
Long before the ‘wedding sneaker’ became a fixture at every local market stall, founder and chief designer Palak Doshi pioneered the category, dressing comfortable sneaker silhouettes in the kind of heavy, heritage embroidery usually reserved for bridal juttis. It effectively gave brides and their best friends permission to dance through an entire wedding instead of enduring it.
Comfort runs alongside an equally firm stance on compassion. The label has a strict no-leather, no-animal-derived-material policy, a decision derived from Palak’s own love for animals. “Fashion should never come at the cost of compassion,” she says, adding that Indian craft already offers more colour, texture, and detail than any designer could need, without ever having to reach for hide or fur.
Each design at ChalJooti is a story in itself, inspired by folktales and fables. Coin-embellished ‘snootis’, one with hidden compartments referenced from Ali Baba’s secret door, a ‘lotus garden’ silhouette scattered with elephants and blossoms lifted from the Hitopadesha — timeless tales find physical form across the label’s collections.
“I want every shoe to feel like wearing a piece of a story,” Palak says.
ChalJooti’s creative packaging replaces common shoeboxes with custom-made metal trunks and reusable cloth shoe bags meant to be repurposed rather than binned. ‘Pocket shoes’ is a recent addition with Indian interpretations of Japanese tabis, showcasing that comfort, creativity, and sustainability can exist together
ROUTED THROUGH NATURE
What would a shoe look like if it were built the way a bird builds a nest? Birdhouse designs footwear the same way — instinctively, sustainably, and with nothing wasted.
Malika Garg, the founder of the Jaipur-based brand, describes how the sight of ‘a chirping Myna or a soaring Eagle’ out on a walk is enough to pull her straight back to nature. Her brand naturally evokes the tranquil notion that we all grew up with but may have lost in the chaos of the world: the notion of coexistence with nature.
Inspiration from nature governs every material choice on the rack: cork footbeds in lieu of synthetic soles, jute, wood and algae-based EVA takes the place of petroleum-derived alternatives; and there’s a strict non-compliance for leather, wool, silk or any other animal-derived materials.
Moreover, Birdhouse names its collections with a poetic finesse. Traces of Time reimagines Harappan silhouettes for modern feet, while Chand Aur Chakor, referring to a moonlit pairing, lends its name to zari-hand embroidered Chand Heels where birds nestle into a crescent motif. The brand’s dedicated festive edit, Gul, has hand-embroidery and jewel tones take centre stage without ever giving up the cork sole underneath.
Look closely at any of these and the namesake keeps reappearing. A tiny bird is woven into a strap or a stitch pattern echoes the weaving of a nest. The shoes are packed in cotton shoe bags with seed-embedded tags and shoeboxes are designed to be planted, or upcycled into an actual, functioning birdhouse, giving back to earth.
FROM JUTTI TO JET-SET
Laksheeta Govil was still in college when she fell for a pair of sneakers she couldn’t afford. Rather than let it go, she bought a plain white pair, picked up a paintbrush, and painted her way to something better — a design she called “Fiery Fiesta.” The refusal to settle for what was on the shelf eventually led her to a staple in Indian footwear: the jutti.
The problem, as she saw it, wasn’t the jutti’s look. It was that nobody could wear one for more than an hour without wincing. Most had no padding to speak of, and shoe bites were treated as the price of tradition. Laksheeta rebuilt the shoe from the sole up before she let herself think about embellishment.
Only once the fit was right did the silhouette begin to wander into jutti-sneakers, mojaris, loafers, brogues; each one still hand-embroidered by artisans in techniques like mukaish, zardozi, crochet, raffia, and macramé, now turning up in unlikely company alongside denim, tie-dye, and a zodiac collection built around each wearer’s sign.
What started as one painted pair in a hostel room has since found its way onto sixteen-plus store shelves and into suitcases headed for the US and UK, with Alia Bhatt and Kareena Kapoor Khan among those photographed in a pair along the way. Lakshita’s plan is to expand into newer categories, and continue celebrating Indian craftsmanship through contemporary design.
ROUTE TO ROOTS
Meera Dureja had a sketch, not a business plan, when she first went looking for someone who could build it. With no formal training in footwear design, she did the next best thing: she walked.
For weeks she moved through the lanes of Old Delhi, stopping in workshops, watching craftsmen work leather with tools she didn’t yet know the names of, until she found someone who could turn paper into a shoe: a 55-year-old artisan whose hands, more than any mentor could have, showed her what her design was actually capable
of becoming.
That search became the studio. Dureja and her brother, Karanveer, launched Banjaaran in Faridabad in 2019, naming it after the Hindi word for “nomad”, meant to capture that spirit of restless exploration across cultures and communities.
Banjaaran celebrates and upholds the age-old craft of Indian shoemaking that the founders felt was being flattened by fast fashion. Every pair passes through the hands of karigars practising block printing, batik dyeing and hand embroidery, in partnership with artisan clusters in Kutch, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh.
“Design must bridge the gap between human needs, culture, and ecology,” Meera describes the studio’s approach.
The outlook plays out in collections like Bageecha and Nazar, where evil-eye motifs, ikat-inspired patterns, and tribal colour-blocking turn brogues, mules, and slip-ons into wearable pieces of art that can be donned well beyond a single festive season, while functioning as everyday, long-wearing shoes, with enough story in them that can be told more than once.