Heritage
A house, in its own words
Manish Arora established his eponymous label in 1997 after studying at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi. The designer built his reputation through collections staged at both London and Paris Fashion Week, carving out a visual identity built on saturated color, kaleidoscopic prints, and unabashed ornamentation. By the early 2010s, Arora had reached a significant career milestone when he was handpicked by Puig to revive the historic French house of Paco Rabanne, a role he held starting around 2011. That appointment placed him among a small circle of designers entrusted with steering a legacy European fashion name, even as his own label continued to grow independently. Arora's Paris tenure, which he has marked publicly as spanning more than a decade of consecutive shows, coincided with his creative expansion within India. The brand made its debut at India Couture Week in 2015, widening its domestic footprint. By 2018, Arora was ready to translate two decades of fashion into a new medium: his debut fragrance collection, developed with perfumer Daphné Bugey. The three-part Ready To Love launch was timed alongside the opening of a new creative space in India, framing the scents as a natural extension of the label's broader artistic life rather than a side venture. Arora's design philosophy has always centered on joy, color, and fearless visual excess, a sensibility his collaborators have shorthand as "Life Is Beautiful." The phrase doubles as the title of a short film commissioned by SCAD (the Savannah College of Art and Design) and executive produced by SCAD president Paula Wallace. In that film and in his collections alike, Arora treats clothing, and later fragrance, as a vehicle for optimism rather than restraint. When he moved into scent, that philosophy carried over directly. Rather than a single signature eau, Arora released a color-coded trio, with each bottle and each juice linked to a specific emotional register: intense red, deep orange, hot pink. The approach treats fragrance the way he treats print and embroidery, as a chromatic system where mood is chosen before notes are considered. The label's identity has consistently resisted the minimalism that dominates contemporary luxury. Arora's runway work has long been described in trade press as "maximalist," a word used by SCAD when titling its documentary portrait of him. That maximalism is a deliberate counterpoint to pared-back fashion, and it gives the fragrance line a clear conceptual lineage: the scents are meant to be worn as boldly as his garments are seen.