Fashion on TikTok is moving beyond outfit videos into real life. In Mumbai, emerging designer Diya Joukani lets it unfold on the street
How is fashion changing on TikTok, and why does so much of that change seem to be taking shape in India? Across social media, content has started to move beyond the logic of the outfit video, edging towards something closer to documentary. Here, clothes circulate through the environments they inhabit, shaped by context and use. This has consequences for how fashion is seen and where its visibility is produced. As garments move through lived situations and local cultures, the distinction between presentation and experience begins to blur — along with the structures that once defined how brands reached their audience. Much of this is unfolding in Mumbai, where the work of emerging designer-turned-influencer Diya Joukani offers a particularly clear view of this transition.
What Fashion Looks Like When It Moves Through Real Life
A girl buys a coconut on a street somewhere in Mumbai. Then she slips past a chai stand, disappears into the crowd and reappears, climbing onto a bulldozer, still in full look, as if it had always been part of the plan. What exactly is happening here? What are we watching, and why does it hold our attention?
At 25, designer Diya Joukani has built one of the most compelling fashion presences online, embedding the clothes from her own brand, and increasingly those of some of the industry’s more forward-thinking heavyweights, directly into lived situations instead of isolating them as objects. She first went viral on TikTok, with videos reaching over ten million likes, wandering through the streets of Bombay in pieces made in her own atelier, earning her the label of “the cool girl from India.”
The content on her profile (@ooo.nani.nani) resists obvious scripting, moving through the city as she does, guided by instinct. It’s no coincidence that versions of her format have already surfaced elsewhere, from Tokyo to Cairo.
From Outfit Videos to Short Films: How Diya Joukani Is Changing Fashion Content on TikTok
If you’re not on TikTok, you can still follow the Indian designer-turned-influencer on Instagram, where she posts under @diyajoukani. What unfolds there, as on TikTok, is difficult to pin down.
The videos drift between an outfit video and a short film: you can sense the documentary pull of “day-in-the-life” content, but there’s always something built into it. And there’s a strong sense of craft throughout. When showcasing pieces from her own brand, Diya Joukani presents garments rooted in Indian techniques such as aari and zardozi embroidery, produced locally with artisans and shaped by a close, tactile attention to materials.
Instead of separating all these dimensions, she lets them collapse into a single flow. The clothes are never framed as standalone pieces: they circulate through the video itself, and through that circulation, they acquire visibility and meaning. There is no runway logic holding things together, no formal campaign structure in sight. What reads as spontaneity aligns closely with how fashion is actually encountered online.
Why Fashion Brands Are Adapting to Creators Like Diya Joukani
This dynamic is clearest in her recent collaboration with Nike. After years of building campaigns around the product, the Beaverton-based sportswear giant steps into Joukani’s existing visual language. The Air Max moves through her world at her pace, following her as she navigates the city.
The phenomenon says quite a lot about where the fashion industry stands today, and how it needs to operate within content-driven platforms to remain visible. For decades, fashion houses have determined in advance how and where their products appear. Here, that logic loosens—the partnership reshaped around the creator’s way of working, not the other way around.
Why Mumbai Is Emerging as a New Centre for Fashion Visibility
Diya Joukani’s work reflects how fashion storytelling is taking shape today—the kind that generates attention and sustains it—where meaning no longer descends from the top but grows out of specific cultural contexts. Mumbai is far from incidental here: the city holds everything in place, shaping how these images come together.
Her videos never separate the clothes from their surroundings. You catch artisans at work, street vendors drifting in and out of frame, scraps of conversation, and even the kind of interruptions that would normally be edited away. It’s no surprise that, in an interview with Vanity Fair, Joukani described India as “the source of her creative drive.”
She also told the magazine: “We’re often reduced to a stereotype, and I want to show that reality is very different from how it’s portrayed. Bombay, for instance, is very fashion-forward.” It’s that same connection to place that gives the videos their reach. They feel anchored, resisting the flattening effect of the feed, and it is precisely that specificity that allows them to travel.
She explains that she set out to show her city as she experiences it, describing India as a place where multiple things unfold at once, often chaotically. She intended to capture those moments while keeping her own creations within the frame, letting them exist inside that flow.
She presents the process as largely unplanned, guided by spontaneity, which in her view may explain why the videos resonate so widely. Even the passers-by who appear in them aren’t performing; they respond with genuine curiosity, sometimes stepping in to help. She also points to the role of music, often drawing on Frank Ocean, her favourite artist, to colour the atmosphere.
How Diya Joukani Brings Indian Craft Into Digital Fashion Culture
Joukani came to fashion through a vintage boutique, then worked as a stylist between 2021 and 2023—a trajectory that still runs through her brand. The pieces, released in periodic drops on her website, Diya Diya, carry traces of her background and her roots, with a group of eight Indian artisans responsible for the embroidery that defines them.
“For me, it’s very important to show their work to the rest of the world because, unfortunately, it’s an art that is disappearing,” she told Vanity Fair. “I usually design the patterns I want to incorporate into my garments, and they bring them to life, embroidering them by hand, bead by bead.”
Why Fashion Content on TikTok Feels More Real Than Traditional Campaigns
What the content posted on @ooo.nani.nani and @diyajoukani makes clear is how little distance remains between creator and audience, and how blurred the line between product and experience has become. The effect is immediate as well as unmediated: you’re not led through the brand; you come across it in passing, the way you might notice something on the street.
It also points to a reconfiguration of where fashion visibility is produced. For a long time, recognition depended on proximity to established capitals: Paris, Milan, and New York.
How Diya Joukani’s Work Travels From Local Context to Global Visibility
Diya Joukani traces a different map, one where relevance grows out of a strongly local identity and an instinctive grasp of digital formats.
With her approach already echoed across other cities, the emerging Indian designer moves beyond the viral-creator category. What her work brings into focus is a way of operating in which craftsmanship and distribution no longer pull in opposite directions — where the speed of online circulation doesn’t dilute tradition, but amplifies it.
Where Fashion Lives Now: Between Creators, Audiences and Everyday Life on TikTok
What stays with you is a different way of seeing it. Fashion here isn’t staged or introduced with ceremony. It unfolds within the flow of everyday life, taking on meaning through how it’s worn, noticed, and shared.
Edoardo Passacantando
Editor, Milano