In an exhibition, students of WUD bring together fashion, product design and architecture
With disciplines intersecting, students have been encouraged to think beyond traditional boundaries
Inauguration of MIW Design Show 2026. (Source:File) A jacket that turns into a bag. A typeface built for embroiderers who don’t read English. A backpack engineered to make hiking and trekking easier. On display at Delhi’s India Habitat Centre this week, these were the graduation projects conceived by students of World University of Design (WUD), Sonipat.
The second edition of the Made in WUD or MIW Design Show 2026 brought together 60 works selected from over 319 graduation projects at WUD. The exhibition that was on till May 31 at Visual Arts Gallery spanned everything from fashion and textile design to architecture, product design, UI/UX, animation and digital media.
What sets this exhibition apart is its insistence on industry collaboration. Every final-year student must work with a company. The results go straight to market. “In India, art, architecture and design colleges are usually separate. We brought everyone together and told them to work with each other,” said Vice Chancellor Sanjay Gupta. “The MIW Design Show represents the future of creative education where disciplines intersect, industry engagement is central and students are encouraged to think beyond traditional boundaries,” he added.
Fashion Design student projects on display at MIW Design Show 2026
Devender Singh Kharb, founding Dean of WUD’s School of Fashion, shared that one student’s textile collection made in collaboration with Mahajan Overseas Pvt Ltd and Maspar — a Panipat-based export house — has been included in their buying inventory. Another developed a clothing line for children with anxiety and special needs: a “fidgety” collection with detachable patches and trims that kids can pull off, move around, or play with as a sensory tool.
Then there’s Tanush Debnath, whose backpack Nomad-85, a roll-top trekking bag made from ripstop fabric, has already launched and will be live on the company’s website within the fortnight. He spent 70 per cent of his design time on ergonomics alone. “It has a suspension system; you can actually feel the spring,” he explains. “Even if you are carrying 5 kg, it will feel like 3 kg because it captures and stores the weight through potential and kinetic energy.” The bag is designed for 15-20 day treks, solving the “accessibility gap.”
Anna Raphy, a 22-year old fashion design student who worked with a block-printing brand, Crystal Heal, showcased a lesson on how one can make the best out of waste. She noticed that the “underlay” fabric, the base cloth spread beneath the one being printed, is always discarded after production. Nobody seems to notice it. She made it into a garment. “Even those imperfect things you see can convert into a beautiful piece which has a story in it,” she says. Her creation is a unisex, one-size jacket that can also be converted into a bag, dyed with a stone-wash technique to give the leftover fabric texture and life. Each piece is unique.
The show also featured Aparna Patidar, a 22-year-old Fashion Communication student who spent her graduation project developing a visual language for Mori, a brand that identifies craft clusters and turns their work into contemporary art. She chose hand-drawn illustration over photography deliberately and has shown faces of artisans without exposing their identities and making them vulnerable. Her drawings are so detailed that they look like photographs. She explains, “I did a lot of life sketching during my four years here. I did live sketches in Kutch – of the clothes, the fall of the fabric…. That’s why it looks realistic.”
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