Leaving London and Paris, this creative couple fell in love in New Delhi

I first met Rikki Kher in Paris, at Deeya, a concept store run by luxury fashion consultant Marielou Phillips and her husband, Matthieu Foss. Perhaps it was the fact that we were in another creative couple’s sacred space, but Kher animatedly talked about his wife, the jewellery designer Olivia Dar. By the time he mentioned her name, I realised the story I wanted to tell wasn’t just about Kardo, his craft-rooted menswear label that now retails around the world, or its brand-new flagship in Delhi’s Lodhi Colony. It was about two creatives who have built parallel worlds under one roof and how those worlds continue to shape each other.

The Lodhi Colony flagship, Kardo’s first ever brick-and-mortar store, looks less like a retail space and more like a living room. “I wanted it to feel welcoming,” Kher says. “A place where people can congregate, not necessarily only to shop. I don’t want it to be a temple to design.” He describes it as a space to drink coffee, listen to music, and “talk about craft, menswear, ideas—the things that make us human”. A big couch, records playing, art on the walls... It’s easy to read it as an extension of Kher himself—warm, grounded, open-ended, and all to echo his lifelong desire to make people feel like they belong somewhere.

That sense of warmth isn’t accidental. Before Kardo, Kher ran a London store called Against the Grain with his first wife. It was a 1990s concept store that stocked up-and-coming designers before concept stores were fashionable. “It was entirely her idea,” he explains. “It was a place where people hung out. I met so many interesting people there,” he recalls. The new Lodhi flagship channels that memory. When it opened, the turnout was, in his words, “a brilliant vibe of friends, good people, lots of laughter”.

Kardo itself was born out of necessity and rebellion. As we chat, he describes London’s recent anti-immigration protests as triggering. Kher’s mother owned a sari shop in Streatham that, growing up, often drew more sneers than customers. It was an early experience of what it meant to be brown, British, and visibly different in a city that wasn’t always kind. Those experiences hardened his resolve, even if it took another continent for that defiance to find its form.

After moving to India in 2004, he began working with Indian factories, but a few years later, broke and newly single, he started making his own clothes. “People would ask where I got them, and I’d say I made them myself,” he remembers. The brand grew from there: a small workshop in Shahpur Jat, one tailor, one masterji, and a resolve to name each maker in every garment. “Stop hiding the people behind fashion,” he says. “Celebrate them.” That impulse birthed his motto, ‘Unapologetically Indian’, a personal “fuck-you to the world” as a British-Indian at the receiving end of routine racism. “I’m not going to apologise for being who I am,” he says.

If Kardo embodies a subtle, tactile masculinity—think natural dyes, clean lines, the texture of human hands—Olivia Dar’s universe, in contrast, is riotous, intricate, and joyously feminine. French by birth but global by instinct, she arrived in India 25 years ago, fell for its craft culture, and stayed. “I did a lot of embroidery for haute couture,” she says. “But I was more interested in how things are made than in fashion itself.” In 2011, she founded her eponymous jewellery label, inspired by Indian embroidery and her own travel-collected textiles.

Her home studio, a converted three-storey building that once belonged to Kardo, employs around 45 artisans. “A human size,” she calls it. Her practice still fuses past and present: embroidered bags that echo ikats, talismanic earrings that reference tribal jewellery, and one-off garments made from vintage fabrics she gathers on her travels.

The two met in Delhi in 2011 at a Sotheby’s dinner. “I found her fascinating,” says Kher. “It wasn’t romantic. She was gentle, open-minded, and generous. Then we became friends and later started dating.” Dar’s first impression was equally matter-of-fact: “A gentle, open mind and an interesting, generous person,” she recalls.

Their home in Delhi’s Defence Colony mirrors this marriage of sensibilities: “The perfect balance between Rick’s neatness and my mess,” Dar laughs. There are carpets from Kazakhstan, suzanis from Uzbekistan, pillowcases from Afghanistan. A photograph she took at the Hornbill Festival in Nagaland hangs in the living room—a blur of women in white woven cloth, captured mid-dance. “Before we had our daughter, we travelled a lot,” she says. “Travelling, textiles, food... That’s what we do together.”

Kher’s description of the same space is characteristically dry. “On a tidy day...” he jokes. “There’s music, art on the walls, craft cushions, post-modern furniture, and an ugly chandelier our landlord won’t let us take down.” Their living room isn’t styled so much as layered, much like their life together. Their home feels like a lived-in gallery where you can trace their relationship through its rooms like a map of shared fascinations and inherited objects.

Creative couples have long intrigued culture-watchers—from the Eameses sketching side by side to Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz shaping each other’s gaze. There’s a quiet choreography to such partnerships. Watching Kher and Dar, it’s clear they’ve found their rhythm.

Over the years, they’ve travelled through Myanmar, Japan, Portugal, northeast India, and Puglia. “Travelling with her is fantastic,” Kher says. “She can go luxury or go slumming. It doesn’t faze her.” The souvenirs of these trips—a suzani, a Baluchistan dress, a carpet, a photograph—now populate both their home and his collections. When Kher first used vintage suzani textiles in Kardo’s jackets, it was upon Dar’s suggestion. “She’d been collecting them for years,” he says. “She told me, take some, use them. I did, and it worked beautifully.”

Their creative exchange is constant but unforced. “Whenever she gives me critical advice, I secretly love it,” he admits. “Her eye is amazing.” Dar, in turn, says his business sense gave her the initial push to start her brand. “He was my first salesperson,” she laughs. “I was shy, and he’d go out and sell for me.”

Despite their intertwined worlds, they keep their studios, and egos, separate. “People often say, why don’t you work together?” says Kher. “We look at each other and go, do we want to stay married?” Living with someone who speaks your creative language can be equal parts magic and mayhem. The upside is shorthand. A kind of mutual understanding that makes critique feel like care. The downside is proximity: when your work lives where you do, there’s no off switch. But they’ve found a balance: he brings discipline and process; she brings colour and intuition. “He calls me a magpie,” she laughs. “I love anything that shines. He’s indigo and plain, in a good way, and I’m more colour, more mix.” 

Today, as both brands grow internationally, with Kardo showing in Paris and New York and Olivia Dar at Le Bon Marché in Paris, their Delhi home, which they share with their daughter, Evora, remains the anchor. “India is our nucleus,” Kher says. “If we don’t invest in our own home, what’s the point?”.

In many ways, Kardo’s store and their home are extensions of the same idea: intimate, handmade, full of stories. The new flagship, much like their home, is proof that craft and life, love and work, can coexist. In a world obsessed with separation—between the personal and the professional, the minimal and the ornate—Kher and Dar make a quiet case for synthesis.