KATHMANDU, July 23: White T-shirt, black pants, and red slippers. Samridhi Karmacharya, 21, decides not to wear her usual small red velvet tika. Today, she opts for a long red tika, one that receives a lot of stares on her forehead.
Karmacharya, who had recently become free from 12 years of uniform, decided to experiment with her clothes. She always knew she wanted to pursue fashion. However, she chose a BBA degree over formal fashion school because she didn’t see many people making a career in fashion in Nepal.
But she didn’t let go of her creative side. Simultaneously, she took up a fashion diploma course. While BBA gave her a structure and a sense of commercial awareness, her style remained radically expressive.
At BBA, she was an introverted classmate. Gradually, she started wearing her designs there too. She was experimenting with tikas, starting with small velvet ones and slowly shifting toward longer, bolder shapes that would soon become her signature.
At fashion school, her smocking designs were often told, “This is too much,” or “You can’t design it like that,” making her question the institution’s claim towards creative freedom and experimentation.
#Dashain Tika clicks
What began as a daily Instagram story called “Tika of the Day” evolved into something much larger. She got a lot of messages asking if she sold the tikas.
This hit her with an idea. Her BBA course came in handy, she figured a gap and decided to launch her own brand.
The planning took her almost two years to complete. She kept asking herself, “What does a Nepali woman look like without the influence of the West?”
That’s when she launched “Saubhagya”, as a passion project to reimagine modern women with fragments of Nepali culture.
“Culture shouldn’t feel like a burden. Or like a costume you only wear for events. I want it to feel normal again, fun, if I have to say.”
In a city where Western fashion often sets the standard, and where modernity is often defined by minimalism or imported aesthetics, her designs embrace what others might dismiss as “too much.” And yet, they resonate.
She says, “I’m not against Western fashion. We’ve all grown up with it. But I want to find a balance. I want to take what’s mine and shape it for my generation.”
What makes her work meaningful is that she doesn’t stop at designs. She creates spaces where people gather to play with tika styling, reflect on womanhood, explore emotion, and celebrate each other.
“It’s not about crafting tikas from scratch,” she says. “It’s like doing makeup together, trying, laughing, bonding. Each workshop has a theme. Sometimes it’s about relationships, sometimes identity. There’s always sharing. Always learning.”
For her, Saubhagya is not just about tika, there’s much more. It’s about womanhood and relationships.
“I never planned for this. At first, tika was just an accessory. Now it’s something more. If suddenly everyone started wearing tikas like me, I think I’d have a bit of an identity crisis,” she jokes. “But at the same time, I’d be happy. Because that would mean it’s working. That culture is being embraced, not just performed.”
Even her parents, who were once unsure of her experiments, have grown to accept them. “Now they don’t say much. I think they get it.”
Karmacharya’s designs revolve around experimentation and self-expression. She hopes to find a balance between the west and nepali culture with Saubhagya in the future.
