Kartik Research, the New Delhi-based menswear brand founded by Kartik Kumra, has postponed its upcoming Paris Fashion Week runway show following the death on May 28 of one of the brand’s employees, 26-year-old Divyanshu Joshi.
The runway show, which had been slated on the official Paris men’s schedule for June 25, will be postponed, a spokesperson for the brand confirmed to GQ today. A new date has not been announced.
Joshi, who managed Kartik Research’s Delhi retail store for two years, was also a model who often appeared in photo shoots for the brand. According to reporting by the Indian fashion news outlet The Voice of Fashion, The Times of India, and The Hindustan Times, he died by drowning at an abandoned stone quarry in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Per the latter two outlets, the quarry had been inactive for over 20 years and was off-limits to the public. The brand spokesperson confirmed that Joshi had participated in a seasonal shoot for Kartik at a local theater in the city of Kochi earlier that day; later on, he and the Kartik team, including Kumra, traveled to North Kochi to scout out another location, where Joshi reportedly died while swimming in the quarry’s lake. Investigation of the case is ongoing, and local police have yet to release an official postmortem report.
The brand acknowledged Joshi’s death in a May 31 Instagram post that described him as a “dear colleague and friend.” The post also claimed that “inaccurate accounts of this tragedy continue to circulate” online, saying, “We wish to clarify that Divyanshu was in Kerala as part of a seasonal photo shoot and was not participating in any swimming related activity as part of the production. Some public reports have mischaracterised the circumstances of the incident.” The brand spokesperson stated that Joshi’s swimming was unrelated to the shoot or location scouting. Comments on the post have been locked.
Kartik Research has become one of India’s buzziest menswear exports in recent years. Kumra—who launched the project from his university dorm room in 2021, when he was 20 years old—was named as an LVMH Prize semi-finalist twice, in 2023 and 2026, and opened a successful flagship store in downtown New York last year. In January, Mayor Zohran Mamdani wore a Kartik Research tie during his inauguration in New York City.
