(February 16, 2024) Her initial vision as a teenager growing up in India was to join a reputed law firm and become a human rights lawyer. However, fate had other plans for Diipa Khosla. Soon after completing her degree in international human rights law from University College Utrecht, in the Netherlands, she moved to London for her master’s from BPP University. It was here that she bagged an internship at a fashion agency during the four-month break between her university and job as a lawyer. “To my utter surprise, it turned out to be Europe’s first influencer agency. I knew nothing about this world, yet on my third day in the sales team, I was closing huge deals with fashion brands like Mango and Kiara,” the fashion influencer said in an interview.
From there, Diipa has come a long way – and recently created history by addressing the universal themes around ‘Changing the Narrative as Minority Women Leaders’ at the Harvard Business School. Bringing her inspirational entrepreneurial journey to the fore, the fashion icon said, “As a proud Indian, building a global business and being a minority woman doing that globally is something extremely powerful. It’s truly our time as Indian women to be able to do that.”
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The Global Indian is also the founder of a very successful ayurvedic skincare brand, Indē Wild, and an NGO, Post For Change. “In today’s day and age having an online presence is almost a form of like a marketing channel or like a social currency. So it’s really ultimately the people that you’ve built over the last few years, they trust you so much. So when you create something – a product or service – for them, they know you would have created it with the best intentions. For me is the best way to create a brand, to be honest, because you take them on the journey of creating the brand for them and then the brand is out there and they’re the first ones who trust you to buy it,” said the fashion influencer, who boasts a massive following of 2.1 million on her Instagram page alone.
The Indian fashionista
While that is what people know about her, being a lawyer also wasn’t Diipa’s first aspiration. “The funny thing is, I was first a pre-med student. I was studying medicine because well, mom is a doctor and it was kind of expected of me to be a doctor or an engineer. But then I did an internship at a hospital in India, and I realised it wasn’t for me. There was too much sadness. And I remembered that the reason I wanted to be a doctor was to help people and create an impact on them. But I would come back home drained. So, I realised that maybe there’s a different career that can help me help people. So, when I went back to university, I switched tracks and I took up law because we had an amazing international human rights law professor. And because you have the International Criminal Court (ICC) and The Hague in Amsterdam, a lot of big international human rights organisations were around. I thought maybe I can help people by fighting for human rights,” shared the fashion influencer who spent her early childhood in Chennai.
After finishing her bachelor’s there was only one goal that she had, “to be a human rights lawyer”. However, upon observing friends engaged in the legal domain, Diipa realised that while the impact on people was assured, it would be a gradual, long-term endeavour. Fueled by an eagerness for more immediate change, she contemplated if there was a way to make a quicker impact.
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“When I was pursuing my masters in the UK, I had just stepped into the world of social media, and towards the end of the course, I had to decide what I wanted to do. I told myself: Diipa, you cannot be a jack of many trades; you need to be the queen of one, so which one is it going to be? Either you’re going to give it all you got and become a lawyer or you’re going to make it big in this whole new world of social media, that nobody believes in yet,” she said. And that was her calling. The fashion influencer started a YouTube channel (which now has around 18.6K subscribers). Though that decision was an easy one, telling her parents was quite a challenge. “They were quite shocked, but I asked them to give me one year. If at the end of the year, I can’t make it, I’ll go back, finish my master’s, and become a lawyer. And they agreed.”
More than just a pretty face
She gained confidence rapidly, recognising the need to consistently showcase her best efforts and perform effectively within the space. The obligation to present herself daily, even on challenging days, contributed to the development of resilience and a thicker skin. But, the fashion influencer shared that the online community she cultivated over the years has been overwhelmingly supportive and kind.
Eventually, the influencer had about a million people following her on Instagram. At a time when people were fawning over her beauty, the influencer decided to do something no other influencer had ever done. “I remember feeling that I wasn’t doing the best I could by putting out this filtered version of me the whole time. So I decided to like, come clean about my acne and do this entire thing like showcasing how bad it was. I was one of the first people who put out that real skin candidness. And back then I had a blog site like a website and the whole website crashed and a lot of people followed me from there about just the honesty of it,” reflected Diipa, who is also the first Indian fashion influencer to have walked the Cannes Film Festival red carpet. “I remember at that moment how important it was to remind yourself that you deserve to be here. That you know the world is changing, the media landscape is changing, that digital is going to be such a big force to be reckoned with.”
A mother of one feels that anyone who is beginning their career as a content creator or influencer should learn, but not mimic others’ journey. “I have pivoted and evolved, changed my content and my strategy. Try to put out something that you’re passionate about or something that’s organic. The great part of social media today is that you can be an influencer, in pretty much every space, as long as you can give value to people,” the fashion icon said.
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