There are designers who begin with ambition. Rohitash Notani began with an instinct for beauty.
Long before ROSANI became a label, that instinct was already taking shape at home. Born in Baroda in 1983, raised between Baroda and Bombay, and drawn early to the colours, textures and quiet ceremony of getting dressed. Fashion entered Rohitash's life first through the women closest to him, especially his mother Sunita and his grandmother, whose boldness, grace and unhurried sensuality left a lasting mark on the way he would later see clothing.
"Fashion and I have been in a lifelong romance."
That relationship became tangible at nineteen. As Rohitash recalls, "When I was 19 I made my first dress ever for my mom. It was in bright colors of fuchsia and orange, very well fitted and with embroideries in rather unconventional ways." She wore it, people asked about it, and soon friends began placing orders of their own. Around his studies, he started making pieces for the women around him and spending long days searching Bombay for unusual fabrics and hidden materials. The beginning was not abstract. It was practical, emotional and deeply personal.
Even then, the attraction was not only to clothing itself, but to what clothing could do. To make someone feel seen. To add polish and finesse. To shift a mood. To hold beauty with intention. That desire runs clearly through Rohitash's early memories and later reflections, where he returns again and again to the pleasure of making things, and people, feel more beautiful.
His path into fashion was not linear. Business studies were the practical choice, but fashion kept pulling harder. In Bombay, he spent increasing time assisting stylists and designers, making garments and moving closer to the work that felt most alive to him. Later, in Milan, that instinct became discipline. Studying at IED and working within an environment that treated beauty, craft and product with seriousness sharpened his eye and clarified his direction. Garments were no longer only imagined. They were understood in full, from design to cut, from construction to finish and finally through the life they took on when worn.
An internship with the Max Mara Group opened that world further. Years on the production side of fashion followed, deepening his understanding of materials, embellishment, sampling, quality and the problem-solving behind every strong garment. Alongside this, he built his own embroidery business and expanded his hands-on knowledge through work connected to major European maisons, including Versace and Gucci. Craft stopped being admiration from a distance. It became a lived discipline.
If Milan sharpened Rohitash's eye, Berlin expanded the horizon of who that eye could create for. He has described Berlin as the city that gave him courage: the freedom to embrace individuality, to celebrate the diversity of human expression and to understand belonging beyond origin, language or fixed identity. In Berlin, the question of dress became larger than menswear in its traditional sense. It opened into a wider and more fluid way of seeing people.
That is where ROSANI begins to come into focus.
Not as a detached brand concept, but as something shaped by lived experience, contradiction and care. A label grounded in beauty, craft and the belief that clothing can hold both structure and softness at once. Rohitash has described ROSANI as a deeply personal narrative and as a response to the confining image traditional menswear often carries. In its place, he proposes something more open, more fluid and more human.
At the centre of his work is a desire to widen the language of dress. Not by rejecting tailoring or precision, but by opening them up. ROSANI takes elements long treated as fixed - structure, classic menswear codes, ornament, even masculinity itself - and reworks them through contrast, fluidity and emotion. The result is clothing that feels less prescribed and more personal, giving the wearer space to move, evolve and express themselves with clarity. This way of thinking sits close to the brand language ROSANI defines for itself: structure with ease, precision with movement and design that makes space for identity to expand.
Those early ways of working continue to shape the brand. Rohitash still spends hours searching through the storage rooms of fabric suppliers and material dealers, drawn to what others might overlook: unusual textiles, hidden embellishment elements and materials traditionally used for something else entirely. Jacquards intended for interiors may become garments. Metal embroidery elements may find their way into jewellery or accessories. The search itself is part of the making. It is instinct, curiosity and design language at once.
Today, ROSANI continues to grow through attention, craft and intention. The values remain consistent with those that shaped Rohitash from the beginning: a belief in beauty, a respect for making and a desire to create clothing that carries more than appearance. In his own words, he designs with the "simple yet powerful intent of beauty". Not beauty as decoration alone, but as clarity, emotion, self-expression and care.
The women in his life do not sit at the edge of this story. They are part of its emotional origin. Sunita is there at the beginning, in the first dress, in the pleasure of dressing and in the closeness that would later echo in the name ROSANI itself.
ROSANI is what happens when craft, contradiction and personal history meet, and are shaped into a language of dress that feels open, precise and deeply felt.
