The colour of ONGNA’s Destroyer Jeans began with a stone Angana Ananya found beside Kyoto’s Kamo River. She had already decided on the silhouette, but the stone’s muted, washed-out surface gave the design its tonal direction. Back in Toronto, she began trying to reproduce that impression on denim. Each pair is now treated and painted individually, leaving variations in its brushstrokes, washes, and texture.
It is an unusual origin for a pair of jeans, but it reveals something fundamental about Ananya’s approach. At ONGNA, a reference is not simply transferred onto a garment. It passes through material, memory, and the hand, changing slightly each time. The label’s Spacesuit Hoodie is produced through a similar process. Each is sprayed and treated by hand, resulting in subtle differences even when the same orange-toned paint is used across an entire run.
“Those imperfections are my favourite part,” Ananya says. In most systems of mass production, irregularity is treated as an error to be eliminated. At ONGNA, it is evidence that somebody made the garment.
Founded by Ananya in 2024, ONGNA is a Toronto-based label working primarily in contemporary, gender-neutral streetwear. Its garments combine familiar forms such as hoodies, denim, and relaxed trousers with hand-treated surfaces, embroidery, natural fibres, and limited production. “The label exists to challenge the idea that cultural clothing belongs only in museums or traditional contexts,” Ananya explains. The result is not traditional Assamese clothing reformatted for a Western wardrobe. Rather, ONGNA carries forward a way of understanding how clothing is made, valued, and kept.
Ananya’s first encounter with fashion took place at home in Assam, where her mother worked in the handloom industry making traditional garments from Assam silk. She watched the full process unfold, from preparing the silk threads and winding them onto spools to setting the loom and weaving the fabric by hand.
“It wasn’t just about making clothes; it was about craftsmanship, patience, and preserving something that had been passed down through generations,” she recalls. Watching her mother also showed her how a business could remain connected to the place and traditions from which it emerged. Long before Ananya founded a label of her own, clothing had already become inseparable from time, work, and continuity.
That history gives ONGNA’s approach to sustainability a more specific foundation than the language of responsibility that now circulates throughout fashion. Ananya does not describe sustainability as a principle she later adopted in response to the industry’s environmental crisis. In her household, reuse and conservation were ordinary parts of daily life.
“Growing up in an Assamese household, sustainability wasn’t a trend or something we consciously practised. It was simply a way of life,” she says. Containers were saved and reused, fabrics and household objects were repurposed, and well-made things were expected to remain useful. These habits were connected, for Ananya, to Assam’s agricultural traditions and to a wider sense of responsibility toward the land and the communities sustained by it.
Living far from Assam has made that relationship more conscious. Unable to participate in every tradition as she would at home, Ananya has found another way to remain in contact with them through design. “I wasn’t seeing the kind of clothing that reflected both my personal style and where I come from,” she says. “ONGNA became my way of bringing those two worlds together.”
This does not happen through reference alone. It is built into how the label produces. ONGNA works in runs of approximately 30 to 40 units per design, uses deadstock when possible, and primarily sources natural fibres such as cotton. Individual treatments keep garments within the same design from becoming entirely identical. Embroidery, which Ananya identifies as one of the label’s signatures, brings Assamese textile motifs into the visual language of contemporary streetwear. Some of ONGNA’s jewellery is made in India by artisans from families that have practised the craft across generations.
These choices are expensive. Small runs limit economies of scale, while hand processes require time that cannot easily be compressed. For a young, entirely bootstrapped label, the decision to maintain them is not incidental. “Small-scale production and quality materials aren’t the most cost-effective way to make clothing, but that’s a compromise I’m not willing to make,” Ananya says. “I’d much rather create something that lasts than optimise it for cost.”
ONGNA describes this model as “structural scarcity.” Scarcity is one of streetwear’s oldest fixations. Restricted drops and tightly controlled supply have long converted material absence into urgency, status, and resale value. ONGNA is trying to uncouple scarcity from hype by treating it as a material condition rather than an image.
“Structural scarcity simply means that we produce intentionally rather than endlessly,” she explains. “Scarcity isn’t a marketing tactic for us. It’s built into our business model and the way we operate.”
Deadstock makes that limit literal. Once a material is exhausted, a design cannot necessarily be reproduced. Rather than treating this as a disruption to the product cycle, ONGNA uses it to force the next experiment. A different fabric requires a different treatment; a new treatment produces a different garment. Scarcity, in this sense, is less about withholding access than accepting that materials, labour, and time are finite.
The distinction is convincing precisely because it creates a genuine difficulty for the business. How does a label expand without undoing the conditions that distinguish it? For Ananya, growth cannot simply mean increasing unit counts or accelerating the frequency of releases. It has to take place through a wider community, new collaborations, and relationships with retailers capable of understanding the work on its own terms.
Toronto has provided an early setting for that negotiation. Ananya sees the city’s cultural plurality as particularly suited to a label that does not want to divide identity neatly between origin and location. “It allows the label to embrace multiple identities without feeling confined to one narrative,” she says. At the same time, her position as a woman working primarily in streetwear has made her attentive to who is permitted to shape the category. Despite the breadth of its audience, streetwear is still frequently treated as menswear and remains largely male-dominated. For Ananya, building ONGNA within that space is another way of expanding the voices that determine what streetwear can look like.
In June, the label carried that proposition beyond Toronto with its first Paris pop-up, held at Futurs Djassa from June 25 to 28 to coincide with Paris Fashion Week. The presentation brought ONGNA’s garments into a space shared by independent artists, designers, and entrepreneurs, introducing the label to an international public without the machinery of a large fashion house behind it.
“Being able to bring a Toronto-based independent label to an international fashion community and share our work with people from all over the world meant a lot,” Ananya says. The relationship will continue beyond the four-day presentation. According to Ananya, ONGNA will now be stocked permanently at Futurs Djassa, giving the label its first lasting retail presence in Paris.
The milestone arrives as the label credits placements on artists including Davido and Rema with giving its clothing greater visibility, but Ananya remains direct about the less glamorous reality of that momentum. She is still moving between the roles of designer, creative director, marketer, producer, and founder. “Building a fashion label is one thing. Building a business around it is another challenge entirely,” she says.
That challenge may ultimately define ONGNA’s next phase more than any individual placement or international presentation. The label has built its identity around limits: limited materials, limited units, and the amount of work one garment can hold. Its future depends on making those limits viable rather than leaving them behind.
For now, Ananya’s ambitions remain expansive, but her definition of expansion is measured. She wants new stockists, collaborators, and audiences in cities beyond Toronto. She also wants to protect the time required to design and create. If ONGNA’s arrival in Paris represents a beginning, it is not the beginning of mass production. It is an attempt to discover how far a small label can travel while continuing to make like a small label.
Credits
8ruki editorial: Photography by Luis Riese (@luis.riese). Model: 8ruki (@poweredbyruki). Styling by Axel M. (@cocooa_) and Mitch (@mitch_myb). Production by Futurs (@futursworld). Assisted by Amelie (@ameliehrb).
Guershmine and David editorial: Photography by Angana Ananya (@angxongna). Models: Guershmine (@that.girl.from.haiti) and David (@dee_s696). Styling by Marina Fernandes (@marina___fernandes). Assisted by Joelle (@joelle.chackal).
Eric lookbook: Photography by Angana Ananya (@angxongna). Model: Eric. Styling by Alex (@_a1ex_a1ex).
Ashley Katshunga editorial: Photography by Tefetro (@tef3tro). Model: Ashley Katshunga (@ash.katshunga). Styling by Laura Jurkovic (@laurajurkovicc).
Aadarsh Rai editorial: Photography by Angana Ananya (@angxongna). Model: Aadarsh Rai (@aadarshrai_). Styling by Laura Jurkovic (@laurajurkovicc). Photographed at The Handwork Department.
Paris presentation: Photography by Futurs Djassa (@futursdjassa).
Cody Rooney is the Editor in Chief and senior contributor at liminul.
He is a PhD candidate, digital content specialist, writer, editor, multi-media artist, and photographer.