Who Is JUST_AKASH?
People occasionally ask where I came from, usually after discovering that I designed the collections, built the website, wrote the copy, generated the imagery, and somehow ended up running a fashion house without a traditional fashion background.
The short answer is that I didn’t arrive here in a straight line.
Fashion was never the first thing.
Before Ritus Per Diem, there was music. I spent years studying composition and performance, learning how structure creates emotion. A piece of music is really just a series of decisions about tension, release, rhythm, repetition, and contrast. I didn’t know it at the time, but those same ideas would eventually shape how I think about clothing.
After music came a lot of other worlds. Restaurants. Nightlife. Creative projects. Years of paying attention to how people move through spaces and how environments create meaning. Somewhere along the way I became obsessed with systems. Why certain experiences feel coherent. Why some brands feel alive and others feel empty. Why some ideas stay with you years after you’ve encountered them.
Ritus Per Diem grew from those questions.
I wasn’t interested in starting a clothing brand just to make clothes. I was interested in building a world.
Everything starts with writing. Most collections begin as stories, symbols, rituals, and characters before they ever become garments. I call these texts liturgies because they function like the mythology of the house. Once the narrative exists, the silhouettes begin to emerge from it. The clothing becomes a physical expression of the story.
That’s still how I work today.
Every collection starts with an idea. Everything else follows.
People sometimes assume a fashion house begins with fabric. For me it begins with meaning.
The tools have changed over time. Today I use technology that didn’t exist a few years ago. I use AI. I build websites myself. I learn whatever I need to learn to move the idea forward. None of those things are the point. They’re simply the tools available to me.
The point has always been the same.
Take something that only exists in my imagination and make it real enough that someone else can see it too.
Ritus Per Diem is the current form of that pursuit.
Maybe one day someone discovers the house through a garment. Maybe through a photograph. Maybe through a collection. Maybe through one of these blog posts.
However they arrive, I hope what they find is a body of work made with intention.
Not perfection.
Not trends.
Just intention.
Because at the end of the day, that’s what Ritus Per Diem really is: a record of one person trying to build something meaningful, one decision at a time.