Ritu Kumar, 

There’s no putting the grande dame of fashion down. Even after so many years. Recently, she received Rs 100 crore in funding from Everstone Capital, which she plans to use to hire midlevel managers and develop three new brands: Label (footwear), Ri, and Ritu Kumar. Kumar is also at work on a store opening in Dubai, and later in Paris. Apart from running the business, she’s working with the Handloom Board and Weavers Service Centre to study and revive textiles from Varanasi, Bihar, and Odisha. She says it was initially difficult to resist copying what worked for fashion houses across the world. “There were no benchmarks or role models in India when I started.”