When Ronika Pipal opened the doors of Das Werkhaus in Berlin’s Heckmann Höfe this July, everyone thought she was introducing a new slow fashion label to Fashion Week, but actually, she was staging an argument. INHERITED: The Pop Up, held during the busiest weekend of Berlin Fashion Week SS27 as part of the official Studio2Retail calendar, drew over 200 guests for the first public look at PIPAL’s debut campaign and its opening collection, INHERITED: Survival & Existence.
Guests walked in past a saffron-dyed scarf, hand-inscribed in henna with the words “EDUCATE. AGITATE. ORGANISE.”, a line borrowed from Indian social reformer Dr B.R. Ambedkar. It was positioned deliberately to catch both the sun and every arriving face. It set the tone for what followed and didn’t stayed as a brand interested in staying quiet about where it comes from or what it believes.
How a Slow Fashion Label Becomes a Form of Protest.
Pipal, who is Dalit and grew up in Agra before settling in Berlin, has been open about why the installation mattered to her. She describes the Indian fashion industry as largely apolitical, and says PIPAL was built to push against that. Clothing, in her telling, is a voice before it’s a product, and buyers aren’t customers so much as collaborators in a bigger idea about dressing with intention. That thinking runs through the business model. PIPAL puts out exactly one collection a year, with a smaller run of pieces cut from the leftover fabric of that release.
With no mid-season drops and no manufactured urgency it was just a slower rhythm that pushes against everything fast fashion trains shoppers to expect. Building a slow fashion label around scarcity, in an industry that runs on the opposite, is a tension PIPAL doesn’t try to hide.
Deadstock Fabric and Natural Dyeing, Learned the Hard Way
Every garment starts as deadstock fabric or scavenged material, gathered over years of hunting through mills and remnant bins. Pipal handles the natural dyeing herself, a skill picked up mostly through independent study, not formal training, and it shows in the saturation and unevenness that give each piece its own fingerprint. The deadstock fabric is never disguised to look new; the natural dyeing leans into whatever irregularity the material already carries. Nothing about the process moves quickly, and that’s the point.
Her training took her through NIFT Bangalore, which she left over what she has described as caste-based discrepancies in how she was treated, then Accademia Italiana in Rome, and finally a degree at Akademie Mode & Design in Berlin. Along the way she worked in the ateliers of Rianna+Nina, Marina Hoermanseder, and Dawid Tomaszewski, and earned a 2025 German Design Award newcomer nomination from the Rat für Formgebung.
What Comes Next for PIPAL?
Selected pieces from INHERITED: Survival & Existence are already live on PIPAL’s website, and Pipal has said she wants the label carried by stockists internationally over time. Given how small and deliberate the operation is built to stay, that growth will likely happen on her own terms, not the industry’s usual calendar. For a label that made its Berlin Fashion Week debut with a protest scarf instead of a press release, that tracks.
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