Lakme Fashion Week 2026 trends, and what your retailers will actually order for AW27

Lakmē Fashion Week x FDCI ended on 18 October at the Taj Palace in Delhi. It ran for six days with more than forty designers, and if you scrolled Instagram that week, you saw a lot of plum.

The themes were easy to spot. Heritage was there, but styled the way people actually dress now. Suneet Varma started from Varanasi for his Kashi collection, in reds, maroons and black. Wine, plum and silver kept turning up across shows. The tailoring was sharper, some of the shapes were almost sculptural, and regional craft got real space on the schedule: handloom, pashmina, Assamese silk.

It was lovely to watch. Then Monday comes, and a sales head asks the question we hear every year around now: “Okay, but what is a multi-brand store in Indore going to buy?”

That’s what this post is about.

Lakme Fashion Week 2026 Trends vs the Order Book: Why They Never Match 

A runway look is meant to make you stop scrolling. An order is a retailer putting their own money on a rack and hoping it sells before the season ends. Those are two very different jobs.

Right now, retailers are being careful. In the State of Fashion 2026 survey, 46% of fashion executives said they expect things to get worse this year, up from 39% the year before. 71% are planning to raise prices. When prices go up, buyers stick with what they know will sell. You can already see brands reacting: JOOR’s wholesale trends report says ranges are being cut back to bestsellers and evergreen styles.

There’s a good reason for the caution. A Source Fashion report says up to 40% of garments made worldwide never sell. Every one of those pieces looked like a safe order at the time.

That doesn’t mean the market is shrinking. CareEdge Ratings puts India’s apparel retail market at about ₹9.3 lakh crore in FY25, rising to nearly ₹16 lakh crore by FY30. Organised retail is around 41% of that today, and it’s growing faster, at 10 to 13% a year. So the demand is there. The hard part is getting the right range to the right store.

Start with what your retailers bought last time

You don’t need a trend forecaster for this. The answers are already in last season’s orders. Three questions get you most of the way.

What did each retailer buy the last time a trend like this came around? Pick the closest thing from last AW: a festive colour story, tailored separates, or a craft-led capsule. Who ordered it, and how deep did they go? That’s your best clue to who’ll take this year’s version.

Which price bands sold, and which ended up on sale? A plum jacket at the right price sells. Move it one price band up and it comes back as unsold stock.

Who takes a chance on new things? Every brand has a few stores that will try a new idea in its first season. Most won’t touch it until it’s proven. It helps a lot to know which is which before you walk into the show.

So why doesn’t everyone do this? Usually the data sits in Excel sheets someone made by hand after the last tradeshow, one file per region. Nobody has time to go through them retailer by retailer in November.

Turning the runway into a range

Once you have those answers, planning AW27 gets much easier.

Show the trend pieces, like the plum tones and the sculptural cuts, to the stores that took new styles early. Give the careful buyers more of your proven sellers, plus one or two trend pieces as a test. And drop the options nobody ordered in any depth last season. More often than not, a tighter range shown to the right people books better than a big range shown to everyone.

Here’s an example. Say you’re a menswear brand, and tonal embroidery was all over the runway. You look back at last AW and find that only some of your retailers ordered embroidered pieces, mostly the metro stores. Pushing embroidery to every store would be a mistake. The better move is to give the metro stores more depth and offer everyone else a small test pack.

Where QArt comes in

This is exactly why we built QArt Retailer Intelligence. It goes through each retailer’s booking history and suggests an assortment for every store. Your reps walk into the AW27 tradeshow already knowing what each buyer is likely to pick, and where the gaps are.

Executives in the State of Fashion 2026 survey named AI as the industry’s biggest opportunity this year. Planning each retailer’s range before the show is one of the most practical ways to put it to work.

The runway shows you what’s possible. Your order book tells you what will sell.

If you’d like to see it on your own data before your AW27 show, book a 15-minute demo with us. https://www.qartsolutions.com/contact-us