Lovebirds’ internet-breaking show took place in an internet-free garden in Sri Lanka

There is no signboard outside Lunuganga, Geoffrey Bawa’s summer home that the late architect would visit every weekend, journeying one and a half hours from Colombo to Bentota in his Rolls-Royce. The 25-acre space—a former rubber plantation—was designed to be his country retreat, where Bawa experimented with Italian Renaissance terraces, English landscaping, and Japanese garden techniques to thoughtfully compose a Sri Lankan tropical modern space that opened up a natural surrounding that followed its own quiet rhythm.

Across the space you will find 14 bells, each having its own unique sound and purpose. There was one to summon Bawa’s morning tea at the butterfly-shaped pond, another at a sunset spot overlooking the lake, where the architect enjoyed his daily G&T ritual. Even today, these spots remain internet-free, inviting moments of pause and deep reflection. With a rolling lawn and sweeping views of the Dedduwa lake, it was here that Delhi-based clothing label Lovebirds, started by designer couple Amrita Khanna and Gursi Singh, decided to drop the 60 thoughtfully designed looks that make up their spring/summer 2026 collection. “We are immensely impressed by Geoffrey Bawa and his whole approach to architecture and luxury. Through his craft, we understood how luxury is restraint, and we got this whole new dimension on inside-out and being global and local,” said Singh, minutes after the launch.

Like Bawa’s purposeful design, the label’s offerings, since it started in 2014, have included fashionably tailored, utilitarian pieces that can safely be called ageless and have become wardrobe staples for the art crowd. The playful silhouettes and prints have always toyed with art movements, geometry and architecture, but this time, among the startling runway ensembles, is a voluminous box-shaped skirt, chunky bangles, and a whole lot of effortless pieces that in such a natural setting evoke a lot more emotion than usual. “It’s dreamy,” chimed one fashion editor. “Magical,” echoed another. “Structured,” said a third. They were all among the coterie of over 120 artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians that the brand now counts as their inner circle. “So, we decided to reimagine his garden and reinvent it into something we wanted people to experience, just how we experienced it,” adds Khanna, whose knuckles are tattooed with the names of her daughters, Dali and Caro.

Minutes after their clothes hit the runway, the designer duo spoke about their connection with Sri Lanka, the piece that took the longest to be runway-ready, and the one thing Lovebirds had never designed before.

What was the first big decision that you made today?

Gursi Singh: To do less. And to do better, with quality. That was my first decision.

What’s the first thing you do on the morning of a show?

Amrita Khanna: Today I felt at peace when I woke up. I was not panicking at all. I wouldn’t say I sat and meditated… I did not. But I did sit and take a few deep breaths and I was very calm.

Last night, you hosted an engaging discussion on Geoffrey Bawa. I loved the tablescape by Akshita (of Two Odd). And the food and cocktails kept us up for a while. When did you guys call it a night?

GS: Very late. We had to come back from the party and do a lineup. We left at around 10.

AK: Yes, 10.

GS: We did the whole lineup again. We had a meeting with our designers. We all sat together. I think we slept at 2 am.

AK: Maybe 2. We had to recheck the lighting and everything.

Ahead of a day like this, what do you do to switch off?

GS: We know this. We’ve gone through this before. We know, on a day like this, time passes so fast. So, we knew that we have no time to relax, so we were always rushing.

AK: But after that it’s very easy for us to switch off.

So, what is the plan next morning?

GS: We're staying in Lunuganga. I’m going to swim there (points to the pool beside the Dedduwa lake).

AK: And spend some time with our daughters and family, of course.

You once mentioned that it was in Sri Lanka that Lovebirds really took off. Tell us about that

AG: When Gursi and I started, we created a collection together. It was not a business plan, just something we did together. We sent it to a few publications and then went on this backpacking trip to Sri Lanka for a month. We were on scooters, the internet connectivity was terrible, and it was after 10 or 12 days that we actually opened our email and found that people were liking it and asking about us. Then after that, Lakmé asked us to do a show.

GS: From there, there was no looking back.

You’ve been inspired by multiple cities before, whether it’s Jaipur for your SS24 collection or Chandigarh for the SS21 line. What’s made you pick Lunuganga as the location for this show?

GS: You know, it’s mostly with [Geoffrey] Bawa. We came here for the amazing work he’s done here, which isn’t talked about as much as it should be. Most southern regions celebrate this tropical modern trend, but the fact that it started here is quite interesting. It feels so authentic to this place, through locally grown things, the local materiality, but it also speaks to a global audience. And this is what we stand for. We are truly committed to be that brand in the next decade.

Do you keep coming back here?

GS: We love coming here. We are beach bums, so we come here often. This would be our seventh time in 10 years…

And what’s the first thing you do here?

GS: We head to the closest beach. Beaches around Tangalle are beautiful. Mirissa and Hiriketiya too. And what’s the surfer one?

AK: Ahangama beach. And the local markets, of course—the local food, the local antiques and designs. That’s really our thing.

It’s your first international showcase. What was on your mind when you started creating it?

GS: The one thing that we definitely wanted to do was to engage with crafts. But when one starts doing that, your usual sense of designing turns to be kind of simple or traditional or something expected. So, our idea was to really disrupt that. We wanted to bring an extremely international look to a piece that is handmade in Sri Lanka and India within micro-communities. It was a point of view for a global community to see what the South Asian craft communities can bring together.

AK: We were really looking very closely at the idea of tropical modern, which really inspired us.

Was there any fabric innovation or techniques you debuted this time?

GS: We do that every time, whether we talk about it or not. There’s always an evolution. This time, because of Sri Lanka, the major craft for the show was batik, which is the craft from here and Indonesia. So, we engaged with it: we’ve done beautiful polka dots in batik, splatters in batik, crackles in batik. It’s all part of the show. And a lot of this batik is created within the micro-communities of India and Sri Lanka together, so there’s a cross-pollination of this craft between the two communities. And that made us understand how this craft is perceived very differently in these places.

Architecture and geometry are something that you have always played with in your work. Is there a piece in this collection that owes a distinct debt to Sri Lankan architecture?

AK: A lot of it, actually. First of all, let’s start with the colours. There’s a lot of black and white. You could also see we made boxes—literally—out of the skirt. And then we threw in some more colours and circles around.

GS: I think that one piece would be the sarong, which is so much about Sri Lanka and so much about Bawa.

Your clothes make everyone who wears them happy. What is it that makes you guys happy?

GS: There are many things that make Amrita and Gursi happy, but what is it that makes Lovebirds happy? Now that it’s 10 years old and has become its own entity and has its own personality, I think it is happy when it sees people wearing a piece from the first collection. That’s what brings us immense happiness—when you see that it has lived over time and that person has worn it all the time. It’s their piece that they love to keep and love to wear. That’s flattery for us.

If Lovebirds was a person at this garden party, what would it look like?

AK: I would think it would look like one of the sculptures here.

GS: Yes, I think the form of the sculptures at Lunuganga is so beautiful, and what we presented today was also very sculptural.

Is there something we’re seeing at Lovebirds today that we’ve never seen before?

GS: Many things...lots of femininity with masculinity.

AK: We’ve never done a sarong and, yes, there are a lot of feminine ruffles.

GS: And a lot of shoulder pads. Big structures. I think this is the most craft-led collection that we’ve done. It’s what distinguishes this collection from others. We have always engaged with Indian craftsmen... We’ve done block prints, handmade fabrics, hand embroidery… But this time we went to small communities that live very deep inside Sri Lanka, in Ahungalla, which is 30 minutes from Bentota. We did this with the One World Foundation, which is a non-profit that engages with women who are engaging with crafts for their livelihood.

Which was the one piece that took forever to come together?

GS: I think it’s the fabric we made in-house, in our studio with our team. It was made with all the leftover threads and the threads were put together to make this beautiful fabric with a blue sculpture on it. It’s a very deformed, sculptural piece, and it took a very long time and a lot of effort to come together.

AK: But it was really nice to see the team working on it. It was like a community dress.

Describe the collection in three words…

GS: Very forward, craft-led, sculptural.

AK: Powerful, modern, very architectural.