Mumbai: The Ziro Valley has made it into the pages of Vogue India. The magazine announced its first-ever shoot in Arunachal Pradesh this week, with photographs taken at the Ziro Festival of Music in September.
The photographs appear in Vogue India‘s November-December 2026 issue. Shot by Angus Guite and styled by Manglien Gangte, they feature models Amu Teli, Anika Bogi, and Gumji Lollen, alongside musicians and local performers.
The shoot brings together international luxury labels — such as Dior, Gucci and Burberry — and clothes by designers from the Northeast. In one photograph, Gumji wears a Bengal tiger tank top by Hindostan Archive with a checked Burberry kilt. Beside him, Anika wears a red-and-black shawl by Nagaland-based label Kintem and an eri silk skirt by Mizoram-based Lapâr.
But the team wasn’t just photographing models. Singer Temsu Clover was pictured performing at the festival, while women from the Apatani community were captured performing Daminda, a traditional harvest dance. The Apatanis are Indigenous to the Ziro Valley and are known for their farming traditions, weaving and the facial tattoos traditionally worn by women.
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‘Resilience and artistic courage’
In the accompanying article, Gangte wrote about his time at the festival and the people he met. Among them was 80-year-old Tadu Pubyang, an Apatani woman whose family hosted the team. Her face bore traditional tattoos, including “a dark line running down the centre of her forehead and nose”, with markings on her chin.
Gangte struggled to communicate with Pubyang, but when the team was leaving, she came to see them off and gave them traditional stoles. Although he is from the Northeast himself, Gangte wrote that “much of Arunachal Pradesh was unfamiliar to me”. But Pubyang’s gesture reminded him of the hospitality he had grown up with, particularly the way elders back home insisted that “nobody leave empty-handed”.
But the trip almost didn’t happen.
“In the days leading up to the trip, calls for a shutdown in the capital city left us unsure of moving forward,” Vogue India wrote on Instagram. But what the team found was “the resilience and artistic courage of a people, and the harmony of sharing in a collective experience”.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)