On 20th March 2026, the lights of Lakme Fashion Week × FDCI — one of Asia’s most prestigious fashion industry events — fell on a runway dressed with collections designed entirely by students. The showstopper walking those collections was Radhika Madan, one of Bollywood’s most admired young stars. The students were from NIF Global Jodhpur.
For those unfamiliar with the fashion industry: this is not a small thing. Lakme Fashion Week is not a student competition. It is a professional industry event that shapes the direction of Indian fashion for the season ahead. It is attended by press, buyers, stylists, brand representatives, and the biggest names in Indian fashion. Student participation at this level — not as spectators but as presenting designers — is rare, transformative, and career-defining.
This post tells the story of how it happens, what it means, and what it could mean for you.
What Is Lakme Fashion Week?
For readers who want the full picture: Lakme Fashion Week × FDCI (Fashion Design Council of India) is India’s preeminent fashion industry event, held twice a year in Mumbai. It is the platform where established designers present new collections to press and buyers, where emerging designers gain their first significant industry exposure, and where the direction of Indian fashion is publicly debated and set.
International fashion press covers it. Indian celebrities attend and walk it. The collections presented at Lakme FW influence what appears in magazines, on film sets, in retail stores, and eventually in wardrobes across the country.
For a fashion designer — at any stage of their career — a Lakme FW showcase is significant. For a student, it is extraordinary.
How NIF Global Jodhpur Students Get There
The pathway from classroom to Lakme FW runway is not accidental. It is the result of NIF Global’s national network, its NIFD Global affiliation, and years of building genuine relationships with the Indian fashion industry’s key institutions.
NIFD Global’s relationship with FDCI — the Fashion Design Council of India, which co-organises Lakme FW — gives network institutes access to the ‘The Runway’ showcase: a dedicated platform within Lakme Fashion Week for NIFD Global student collections. This is not a side event or a fringe activity. It is part of the official Lakme FW programming.
The collections presented are designed, constructed, and styled by students — under the guidance of faculty and, critically, with the mentorship of figures like Manish Malhotra and Ashley Rebello whose understanding of what a runway collection needs to achieve at this level of visibility is unmatched.
What Preparing a Lakme Fashion Week Collection Actually Teaches You
Ask any NIF Global Jodhpur student who has been through the Lakme FW preparation process, and they will tell you: it is the most intensive and transformative learning experience of their design education. Here is why.
You design for real stakes. There is a difference between designing a collection for a classroom brief and designing one that will be seen by press, buyers, and Bollywood celebrities on a professional runway. The latter demands a standard of finish, coherence, and creative ambition that is simply different in kind — and pursuing it accelerates your development as a designer in ways that no assignment can replicate.
You understand the full production process. A runway collection is not just design — it is sourcing, production, fitting, styling, hair, makeup, music, choreography, and timing. Participating in the production of a Lakme FW show gives students hands-on experience of the entire fashion week machinery, from the first sketch to the final bow.
You build industry relationships. The people in the audience at Lakme FW — the stylists, the brand representatives, the editors — remember faces and collections. Students who present at Lakme FW are introducing themselves to the professional fashion industry before they graduate. These are relationships that can shape a career.
You understand what your work looks like in the world. Seeing your designs worn by a model, on a professional runway, under industry lighting, in front of an audience — this is a formative experience that connects abstract design education to professional reality in a single, clarifying moment.
The Role of Celebrity Showstoppers
In recent NIF Global showings at Lakme Fashion Week, Bollywood actresses including Radhika Madan and industry icon Ananya Panday have walked as showstoppers for student collections — wearing student-designed garments and expressing genuine appreciation for the creativity and craft on display.
This association is meaningful beyond its obvious glamour. When a Bollywood star wears your design on a professional runway and speaks positively about the work, it creates visibility — in press, on social media, in the industry conversations that follow a fashion week — that money cannot buy and that most design graduates never experience in the early years of their careers.
It is also a statement about the standard of the work. Celebrities and their teams are selective about the associations they make. The fact that NIF Global student collections attract showstoppers of this calibre is a meaningful indicator of their quality.
What Ananya Panday Said About NIF Global Students
When Ananya Panday — NIF Global’s Style Icon — attended ‘The Runway’ at Lakme Fashion Week × FDCI, she shared her appreciation for the creativity, craftsmanship, and fresh perspective of the student collections. She spoke about the importance of student designers continuing to evolve and express their unique voice, and encouraged them to keep pushing their creative boundaries.
Coming from one of Bollywood’s most visible young stars — someone who is herself highly attuned to fashion and style — this recognition was meaningful to the students who received it. It is the kind of encouragement that shapes a designer’s confidence and ambition at a formative stage of their career.
Beyond Lakme: London Fashion Week and New York Fashion Week
Lakme Fashion Week is not the only global runway accessible to NIF Global Jodhpur students. Through the NIFD Global network, students have opportunities to engage with London Fashion Week and New York Fashion Week — two of the four pillars of international fashion week culture.
This international exposure does several things: it gives students direct contact with the global fashion ecosystem, it demonstrates that Indian design education can operate at a genuinely global level, and it creates the kind of credential — “participated in London Fashion Week” — that stands out immediately on any design professional’s CV or portfolio.
How This Shapes Graduate Careers
The cumulative effect of Lakme Fashion Week participation, international fashion week exposure, celebrity mentor engagement, and four international certifications is a graduate who enters the job market — or the entrepreneurship landscape — with a profile that is categorically different from graduates of standard local design institutes.
Recruiters at fashion houses and design studios notice. Clients notice. When a young designer can say “my student collection was presented at Lakme Fashion Week,” the conversation changes. It signals not just skill but experience, seriousness, and the ability to operate under professional pressure.
For students who want to build their own labels, the visibility from fashion week participation is a launching pad. Social media coverage of fashion weeks reaches millions of people. A student designer whose work appeared at Lakme FW has a story to tell — and a platform to tell it from.
Is the Lakme Fashion Week Experience Guaranteed?
Honest answer: participation in Lakme FW is competitive even within the NIFD Global network. Not every student from every centre participates every season. The collections that represent NIF Global Jodhpur at these events are selected through a process that reflects creative quality, technical execution, and readiness.
But this is itself part of the education. The aspiration toward Lakme FW — and the standard it represents — shapes the entire culture of design education at NIF Global Jodhpur. Students who understand that the runway is a real and accessible goal work toward it with a seriousness and ambition that raises the standard of everyone around them.
And the institute’s track record — including Radhika Madan and Ananya Panday walking for student collections — demonstrates that this is not an aspirational marketing story. It is something that actually happens, regularly, to students who work for it.
Your Runway Starts Here
If you are a student who wants to design for real runways — not just dream about them — NIF Global Jodhpur is where that journey begins in Jodhpur. Admissions for the 2026 batch are currently open across all fashion design and interior design programmes.
📍 C-18, Opp. Baba Ramdev Mandir, Near Dale Khan Chakki Circle, Jodhpur 📞 +91 82097 51859