Jessel Taank is set on breaking the “tacky” NRI fashion cliché

It isn’t easy to pull off black thigh-high Stuart Weitzman boots at noon on a Friday, but when Jessel Taank glides into Cecconi’s in Manhattan for our interview, she wears them with the confidence of someone who knows they’ll be noticed and isn’t shy about embracing the attention.

The breakout reality TV star made her debut on the freshly rebooted Real Housewives of New York franchise in 2023 and, while the show catapulted her to fame, it’s clear that she is still every bit the London girl in her Isabel Marant grey mohair sweater and oversized distressed denim jacket.

In the Real Housewives universe, style is often defined by one’s ability to turn up the volume, with glamour often being synonymous with excess and labels acting as a shorthand for sartorial relevance—think monogram tracksuits, ostrich-feather gowns, an abundance of Chanel bags, and body-hugging dresses—but Indian-origin, Kenyan-born, London-raised Taank’s approach to dressing employs a more nuanced approached.

“My mother was my first style icon,” she confesses, slipping into the booth opposite me. “She used to be a bit of a rebel—she wanted to be a model, had short hair, and would wear saris under biker jackets. She was always doing things that were so out of the ordinary—not your typical Indian housewife of the ’60s and ’70s.”

With that sense of what it means to be a maverick in mind, it’s hardly surprising that Taank is the first woman of Indian origin to be a part of the star-making Real Housewives franchise, or that she’s not afraid to make an impression. On the show, Taank famously called New York’s tony Tribeca neighbourhood “up and coming”, admitted to putting a popsicle up what Andy Cohen called her “hoo-ha”, and isn’t above slinging shade on Watch What Happens Live, where she labelled co-star and former J Crew CEO Jenna Lyons “a denim-wearing cat lady”. It’s exactly the kind of chaotic energy that makes household names out of reality TV stars, but for all her zaniness the Jessel Taank that sits across from me reads as an equally candid, but perhaps more thoughtful and considered, version of her onscreen avatar.

As with being the ‘first’ of anything, the title comes with both great power and greater responsibility, and Taank took the challenge head-on, starting with the look she chose for RHONY’s season 15 opening credits—a silver metallic Nikhil Thampi draped sari layered over a black rhinestone-studded bodysuit, which she called “six yards of pure fabulousness”. Her tagline for the season—“I’m not up-and-coming; I’m already there”—is both a cheeky call-back to her Tribeca faux pas and evidence that she understands not to take herself too seriously.

Which isn’t to say that Taank isn’t conscious of the fact that she has millions of eyes on her every time she appears on television. “I think a lot about how things look on camera,” she says, “Colour, fabric, whether I’ll be sitting, how it photographs. Because once it’s out there, it’s out there.” Given her years spent working in fashion PR for names like Michael Kors and that her uncle is Max Vadukul, the fashion photographer who shot for magazines like Vogue, Rolling Stone and more, it makes sense that Taank is particular about the image she puts out. This also serves to highlight the compelling contrast between her curated style and the unvarnished, neurotic charm that she showcases on RHONY.

“It isn’t just about me—it’s also about representing every brown girl that ever imagined herself in this space,” says Taank. Like any impressionable teenager who idolised blonde girls in skinny jeans and glossy lips, she eschewed Indian wear as both uncool and something that had the potential to immediately flag her as different. “I would cry when I had to wear a lehenga,” she admits.

The turning point came—as many do—with a Naomi Campbell look that Taank spotted when she was in college. “She did this Dolce & Gabbana show and wore a draped sarong, and I was like, that’s it. I got fabric from Harrods, tied it like a sari, and wore a bralette on top to an event. Everyone lost their minds. It was the first time I felt like I had power wearing something Indian,” she says.

That pivot now defines Taank’s style, and these days she can be spotted on screen and about town in everything from lehengas to saris, with nary a tear in sight. Her love for Indian designers runs deep, beginning with her first Gaurav Gupta piece: “It was navy blue with an embroidered gold bird—I saw it on the runway and I was like, I need that. It was sculptural and dramatic,” she says, “That was the first piece that I ever bought off the runway—nothing gives me the rush that Indian couture does.”

She talks about Indian designers like a fashion editor with skin in the game, professing her love for Amit Aggarwal’s “genius asymmetry”, Rohit Gandhi + Rahul Khanna’s “impeccable tailoring”, calls Anamika Khanna “the future”, and describes Dhruv Kapoor’s latest runway show in glowing terms. “They’re not just modernising Indian fashion or putting a Western twist on it,” she says, “They’re also creating something new—it’s not fusion or costume but its own thing.”

Taank’s fluency with Indian couture seems especially relevant given the discourse around “tacky” NRI fashion over the last few years, with diasporic Indian fashion becoming synonymous with kitschy, dated styles that are out of step with current modes. “For so long, we have been stereotyped and put into a box,” says Taank, “But I wanted to break that mould—I really wanted to show the US audience that Indians are cool. We’re relevant. We’re smart.”

This year, Taank worked with stylist Tanya Ghavri to wear a black sequinned off-the-shoulder lehenga by Sawan Gandhi to New York’s ‘All That Glitters’ Diwali ball, hot on the heels of the feathered mint-green Falguni Shane Peacock number she wore to the same event last year. “I have a platform that’s very unique, and if I can use it to promote and represent Indian fashion, I’m going to take that opportunity,” she says.

But few can exist in the public eye without a regrettable fashion moment or two. For Taank, those moments came in the early days of RHONY, when she was perhaps guilty of leaning too far into the Real Housewives canon, calling her early confessional looks “too floral, too poofy, too Prom-Queen-meets-beauty-pageant. Never again”.

Since then, it’s clear that her on-screen style has matured to better reflect her tastes. In her sophomore season on RHONY she chose a series of confessional looks that included a draped asymmetric maxi dress from Ludovic de Saint Sernin, a chunky lilac Loewe knit, and a striped mock-neck LaQuan Smith bodysuit. There’s a palpable sense that Taank is now more concerned with dressing like herself than she is with trying to dress like a Real Housewife.

As if being an Indian woman on an American reality TV show weren’t enough of a juggling act, Taank is also mother to a set of twin boys. Through the series, she’s refreshingly candid about her IVF journey and admits that motherhood has also had a heavy hand in how she now thinks about her wardrobe. “My dressing got a lot less ridiculous,” she says, “My heels got a lot lower, and I’m into soft fabrics and things that move with you. I’m always going to lean into dressing chic, but when I’m at home I’m in sweatpants—elevated sweatpants but sweatpants nonetheless.” Between bites of her Chicken Paillard, Taank laughingly admits that one of her sons recently took a purple marker to her green Bottega Veneta bag but chalks it up to a casualty of motherhood.

Taank brings that same sense of play to the way in which she shops and confesses that New York and Mumbai are her two favourite fashion cities. “What I love about Mumbai’s fashion landscape is that the city has figured out how to honour its textile heritage without being precious about it,” she says. On her Mumbai hit list are stores like Le Mill, Ogaan, and Sanjay Garg’s Raw Mango. For accessories, Taank is obsessed with The Bohemian, Valliyan, and Bhavya Ramesh. Meanwhile in New York, Taank is a disciple of the “high-low” sartorial philosophy, with stores like Kirna Zabête, Dôen, Isabel Marant and Aime Leon Dore on Mulberry being her meccas for elevated city-girl style. Ever on the hunt for the perfect vintage find, Taank frequents Tokio 7 in the East Village and What Goes Around Comes Around in Soho for archival designer pieces. And like the best of us, she is not immune to a same-day-delivery Net-a-Porter order made from the couch (no matter what her husband Pavit has to say about it).

The lunch crowd has begun to thin and, as the dining room clears, Taank speaks animatedly about her newest venture, Oushq, which brings together her love of shopping and her admiration for Indian fashion. Oushq is a multi-brand e-commerce platform that houses designs from contemporary South Asian and West Asian designers, with names like Dhruv Kapoor and Faraz Manan in the cohort. This month, Oushq partnered with the CFDA, which pledged to help create a limited-edition collaborative collection between a South Asian designer and CFDA member.

As we part, Taank slips on her denim bomber and her black sunglasses, looking every part a London girl in New York, toggling between lehengas and LaPointe, always negotiating both her brownness and her status as a Bravolebrity.