It was eight years ago that Komal Pandey began taking outfit-of-the-day pictures of herself on her mobile phone, in her canteen of New Delhi's Shahid Bhagat Singh College. "That phone had a very bad camera," she cringes. Today, experience and a better phone camera have earned her 1.2 million followers on Instagram, as she nurtures a feed of beautiful well-curated pictures and videos. "My father used to work at NIFT, and had an insight into fashion. So, I realised soon enough that if you have to do something unconventional like fashion, you have to be the best, not mediocre. Especially, if you from a lower middle-class family, where the aim is to become a CA, or engineer. You need courage to do this."

Surprisingly, and honestly, Pandey, 26, tells us that since she had to repeat a year in college—a bad relationship led her to ignore academics—she used the time to start a fashion blog. But she realised early on, that she wasn't a good writer. "What I lacked in writing skills, I made up in the knack for putting looks together and making videos." She worked for a web portal for a while, and in 2017, went solo on Instagram and YouTube, where she earned 80k subscribers in the first week. "Video was just starting to become a viable option then, so I knew I had to tap into it, and be in the first wave of video creators."