In town to celebrate his searing memoir, Walk Like A Girl, at Exide Kolkata Literary Meet, with The Telegraph, on January 25, at the Alipore Museum, fashion designer Prabal Gurung was all heart, just like his memoir. In conversation with journalist Shefalee Vasudev, he made the KaLam Lawns come alive with deeply-felt emotions. “Walk Like A Girl is my permission to the people to embrace their vulnerability because it is a power. We talk about walking like a girl, you know. It was the term used pejoratively against me to diminish my existence. Oftentimes, in a society that we live in, anything that is feminine-leaning is considered weak. Anything that feels soft and vulnerable is considered the opposite of what you’re supposed to be. And I felt like my entire existence was surrounded by women in a culture that I grew up in, where even in mythology, women were celebrated, to icons and films to books to women around my life, they were my heroes. So I never thought walking like a girl was anything other than strong and powerful. But when I went into the real world of an all-boys boarding school, it was thrown at me as an insult. I remember I wrote this title and I said, someday I’m going to write about this. And so Walk Like A Girl is this idea about urging people to embrace their softness, vulnerability, because it is powerful,” he said.

Walk Like A Girl was first published by Viking in 2025, and HarperCollins India has now brought it to the Indian subcontinent. The book talks about Prabal’s journey from Nepal to New York and traverses the many highs and heart-rending lows in his life. “I’ve never looked at myself as a victim. I looked at myself as maybe misunderstood, maybe I didn’t fit in the world. In my family, with my mother and siblings, I was completely celebrated. My strength comes from my family. I pretty much early on realised I won’t fit into this narrow description of what a heteronormative man should behave like or look like, and I was okay with it. For me, I thought I was pretty fabulous from early on. I never looked at myself and had a delusion that I am greater than what I am. I knew who I was. Fitting in the group never became my mantra. I really enjoyed solitude and figuring out things by myself. By saying all this, I am not diminishing the pain I went through, but with that pain, however, I found strength... had I not been through all the stuff, I don’t think I could be the empath that I am today. And I’m so grateful for that,” he said.

Prabal’s eponymous label was born in 2009 in New York, and over the years, he has dressed the likes of Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Kamala Harris, Beyonce, Sarah Jessica Parker, Zoe Saldana, Demi Moore, Jennifer Lawrence and Venus Williams.

Walk Like A Girl was born of the desire to tell the “honest truth”. “I felt I reached a place in my life where I would go out, notice people, meet people, people who admired my work, and, you know, I was fortunate enough to meet them, but all they saw was the highlights of my life, which is Met Gala, fashion shows, parties, like this glamorous thing. And that is all that they equated to what success looks like. And even in our narrative, when you read the memoirs that I’ve read of, let’s say, successful people, it’s oftentimes this heroic journey, like, it’s always like against all odds, really strong. There’s never this story about really giving into this, sorry, for the lack of a better word, like this s*** happened, you know, it happened to me and acknowledging it and letting it not, I would say, diminish you, like giving you the power,” he said.

And, Prabal has bared it all, completely owning it all the time. “You don’t forget it (the agonising moments of a sexual assault). It makes you feel like the world is caving in. The real feeling is that of genuine fear. But I always look at those moments and any other kind of, you know, things that have been thrown at me, I look at it, I always say, look, I have choices here. I can acknowledge it because I don’t ever not want to acknowledge it. One of the reasons for writing this book is also that you have to acknowledge the pain…. And when I was like, all right, you know, I can move on from it…. My story is not just mine alone. That’s what I’ve realised when I wrote this book, and the messages and the emails that have come to me have been so deeply resonating, not just to me, but it has resonated with them. By telling my story, I wanted to free them,” said Prabal.