A single piece of clothing, a pinstriped bandhgala suit with Narendra Modi’s full name woven into the fabric in fine repeating text, sold at auction for Rs 4.3 crore. That’s roughly what most Indian homes cost. It’s also one small window into how thoroughly Modi’s personal style has become its own kind of public property, tracked, photographed, and occasionally sold for charity, in a way few politicians’ wardrobes ever are.
The Man Behind the Look
Modi’s clothing has been made for decades by Bipin Chauhan, who runs the Ahmedabad-based JadeBlue clothing business with his brother Jitendra. The Chauhan family describes itself as seventh-generation tailors, and Bipin Chauhan has reportedly been dressing Modi since 1989, well before Modi held any major elected office.
That’s a detail worth sitting with. The tailoring relationship long predates the political fame, which cuts against any idea that the “Modi look” was manufactured by a campaign stylist for the 2014 election. It was already established, in essentially the same form, a quarter-century earlier, back when Modi was still an organisational RSS and BJP worker with no national profile at all.
What Makes It “the Modi Kurta” Specifically
The style itself is a cotton, half-sleeve kurta, distinct from a standard long-sleeve kurta and from the more formal, high-collared bandhgala jacket also associated with Modi’s wardrobe. In 2012, while Modi was still Gujarat’s Chief Minister, JadeBlue secured rights to formally market this specific cut under the “Modi kurta” label, turning what had been simply his personal preference into an actual retail product name.
It’s worth noting the style itself isn’t entirely new. Half-sleeve kurtas and bandhgala jackets both have older roots in Indian menswear, particularly in Rajasthan and Gujarat, where formal, structured jackets have long been part of regional dress traditions. What Modi did was popularise one specific combination, consistently enough and publicly enough over many years, that it eventually earned its own branded name in the market rather than staying a generic regional style.
The Rs 4.3 Crore Suit
The most famous single item connected to this wardrobe is a pinstripe bandhgala suit Chauhan designed, notable for having “Narendra Damodardas Modi” woven repeatedly into the fabric itself, visible only up close. Modi wore it for a meeting with then US President Barack Obama, and the resulting photographs drew significant attention, and some criticism, over the cost and personalisation of the garment.
The suit was reportedly a gift from a customer rather than a purchase, and it was later included in one of Modi’s mementos e-auctions, the same tradition covered in our separate article on his gift auctions, where it sold for Rs 4.3 crore, with proceeds going toward the Namami Gange river-conservation cause rather than staying with Modi personally.
From Gujarat Shop to National Retail Name
JadeBlue has since built an entire retail line explicitly marketed under the “Modi Kurta” name, with stores and an online catalogue selling the style to the general public well beyond Gujarat, at ordinary retail prices rather than anything close to auction territory. That’s a fairly unusual trajectory for a regional tailoring business: a decades-long private client relationship that eventually became the foundation of a branded national product line, something that happened almost entirely because one long-standing client became Prime Minister.
A Brand Boost for an Ahmedabad Tailor
The publicity from that single suit reportedly had a significant commercial ripple effect for JadeBlue, driving a spike in customer enquiries across the business well beyond anything tied specifically to that garment, an outcome no marketing budget could realistically have engineered on purpose. It’s an unusual case of a small regional tailoring house becoming a recognised name well beyond Gujarat, entirely through one client’s international visibility.
A Style That Spread Beyond One Wardrobe
The half-sleeve jacket cut has, over the years, been noted by international outlets and observers as a recognisable part of Modi’s visual identity on the world stage, similar in a small way to how a distinctive silhouette becomes shorthand for other well-known political figures internationally. Within India, the style has also been adopted more broadly by other politicians and public figures well beyond JadeBlue’s own customer base, to the point where “Modi jacket” functions today as a generic descriptive term for the cut in everyday conversation, regardless of who actually tailored the garment being described.
Bottom Line
The “Modi kurta” isn’t a campaign invention. It’s a genuine, decades-old collaboration between Modi and a family of Ahmedabad tailors, formalised into a retail label only after years of consistent personal use, long before there was any brand value to formalise. The most expensive single piece connected to that wardrobe, the monogrammed Obama-meeting suit, ended up not in Modi’s own closet but in a public auction supporting river conservation, a detail that rarely makes it into the fashion coverage of the garment itself, even though it says as much about the story as the stitching does.
Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available news reports and business coverage listed below. It is written for general informational purposes and does not represent an official statement from the Government of India or the Prime Minister’s Office.
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