On the evening of 20 June 2026, HARRI, VAVA Eyewear, and Nilaya Anthology brought together designers, thinkers, and tastemakers at one of Mumbai's most remarkable new cultural spaces to ask a question that felt overdue: what does designing for an optimistic future actually look like?
The evening was titled Solarpunk: Designing for an Optimistic, Post-Capitalist Future.
The Setting
Nilaya Anthology occupies 100,000 square feet of a former mill in Mumbai's Lower Parel district, designed by architect Rooshad Shroff. Developed by Asian Paints as a global luxury design destination with an Indian perspective, it brings together international design houses and local craft within the same space: Cassina alongside handwoven textiles, Sabyasachi alongside contemporary ceramics, ancient artefacts alongside experimental lighting. It is a space that embodies a particular conviction: that luxury and cultural seriousness are not in conflict, and that India is not peripheral to the global design conversation but central to it. As Pavitra Rajaram, the space's Creative Director, has put it: a place not about consumption but about experience, understanding, and beauty.
It was the right room for this conversation.
The Theme
Solarpunk is a design and cultural movement that emerged as a deliberate counterweight to the dystopian futures that dominate speculative fiction and mainstream discourse. Where cyberpunk imagines a world consumed by technology and corporate control, Solarpunk imagines something harder to picture: a world that has resolved its contradictions. Post-scarcity. Post-hierarchy. Post-capitalist. A future where technology serves communities rather than extracting from them, where making things by hand is a radical act, and where the relationship between humanity and the natural world has been renegotiated on better terms.
It is, in other words, not a comfortable idea for most design industries to sit with. Fashion, in particular, is an industry built on cycles of production, consumption, and disposal. To ask what Solarpunk looks like in fashion is to ask an industry to turn the lens on itself.
That is precisely what made this panel worth having.
The Panel
The conversation was moderated by Praachi Raniwala, fashion editor and one of India's most incisive voices at the intersection of fashion and culture. She was joined by four panellists whose practices each, in different ways, embody a version of the Solarpunk question.
HARRI
HARRI, Creative Director of HARRI London, flew in from London for the evening. His practice has always operated outside the logic of seasonal consumption: every piece handmade in his Smithfield studio, every silhouette a proposal for how a body might exist differently. The inflatable latex forms that made him internationally recognised are not fashion in the conventional sense. They are sculptures that happen to be worn. Challenging the body's fixed form is, in Solarpunk terms, a fundamentally optimistic act.
Pedro Silva, VAVA Eyewear
Pedro Silva, Founder of VAVA Eyewear, brought a decade of practice built on the same tension: objects that are radical in their appearance and responsible in their construction. VAVA's frames use bio-based polyamide derived from castor beans sourced from certified farmers in Gujarat, Mazzucchelli's eco-friendly M49 bio-acetate, Barberini crystal lenses manufactured in zero-waste plants, and aluminium hinges that are 100% recyclable. The material story of the HARRI x VAVA collection is, in its own way, a Solarpunk argument made physical.
Pavitra Rajaram, Nilaya Anthology
Pavitra Rajaram, Creative Director of Nilaya Anthology, has spent her career arguing that India's design heritage is not a reference point to be borrowed from but a living tradition to be built upon. Her vision for Nilaya Anthology places Indian craft at the centre of a global conversation, not as novelty or exoticism, but as a serious proposition about what design can be when it carries cultural weight.
Amit Syngle, Asian Paints
Amit Syngle, MD and CEO of Asian Paints, brought the perspective of scale. Asian Paints is India's leading paint and decor company, and Nilaya Anthology is its most ambitious statement about what a design institution rooted in Indian values can look like. His presence at a panel titled Solarpunk was itself a signal: the conversation about optimistic futures is not only for artists and small studios. It belongs to the institutions too.
The Evening
Arrivals began at 7pm. The panel ran from 8pm: a conversation that ranged across design philosophy, material responsibility, the relationship between commerce and craft, and what it means to make things in a world that produces too many of them.
The guest experience was curated by Feat Artists, whose eye for the right room and the right people gave the evening its particular quality of attention.
At 9pm, a performance by Navin Kelamane, choreographed by Avantika Bahl, offered a different kind of answer to the evening's question: one that moved rather than spoke. DJ Film closed the evening with a set that kept the room in the space between reflection and celebration.
Why It Matters
HARRI has always been most interested in the questions that don't have clean answers. The body as a fixed form. Latex as a fashion material. The inflatable silhouette as something to wear rather than observe. The HARRI x VAVA collaboration extends that instinct into a new discipline: eyewear that is architectural in its logic, bio-based in its materials, and limited in its production. Not as a marketing position, but as a conviction.
Solarpunk, at its most serious, is not an aesthetic. It is a way of making decisions. Every material choice, every production method, every collaboration that prioritises depth over volume is a small act of designing for a different future. The evening at Nilaya Anthology was a chance to say that plainly, in the company of people who are trying to do the same.
Explore the HARRI inflatable collection, the MuseumWear SS26 collection, and read more about the HARRI x VAVA eyewear collaboration.
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All images by Kiara Anthony
