When Ammar Belal won the Lux Style Award (LSA) for Best Menswear Designer last year, he wasn’t around to collect his trophy. For 10 years, he had designed, dealt with catwalk drama and launched madcap, creative ad campaigns — but never won an LSA. And then, the year he decided to push his design acumen further by enrolling into the coveted Masters in Fine Arts and Design programme at Parsons in New York, he won!

“It was so ironic,” laughs Ammar. “There had been many times when I felt that I had created designs that truly deserved an LSA; so many years when I would be nominated but the award would evade me. In fashion circles, we jokingly called it the ‘Curse of the Emerging Talent’. Anybody — including myself — who won an ‘Emerging Talent’ award would never truly ‘emerge’ to win an LSA later!

“Luckily for me, I finally did win and I feel that the accolade was for my entire body of work rather than just the collections I put out in that year. I am sure people must have cribbed about awarding a designer who had moved lock, stock and barrel to New York — I was gladly not around to hear it!”

Even from his vantage point in New York, though, Ammar continues to spearhead his eponymous menswear label in Pakistan, designing and holding Skype meetings while his family mans the business front in Lahore. The label that had ambitiously expanded to multiple branches has now been reduced to a single standalone store in Lahore’s Xinhua Mall. Has the down-sizing occurred because Ammar is no longer stationed in Pakistan, running the business personally?

“Zeroing in on just one shop has been a conscious move,” he claims. “I realised that I had spread myself too thin and needed to consolidate the business. I want to set up production properly before I consider expansion. I may be living in New York but I am still very involved in my brand, flying down to Lahore every four to five months to design seasonal collections.”

I caught up with Ammar during one such business trip. He slipped out of snowy New York to a just-as-freezing Lahore for a few weeks. Even before he shifted to the West, there was always an Anglicised touch to Ammar Belal. With his dewy, poster-boy looks, fair complexion, wacky, spot-on dress sense and a supermodel wife on his arm (he jokingly refers to himself as Mr Aaminah Haq), Ammar was always our true blue gora designer.

He knew it too, starring in umpteen ad campaigns for his label; striking a Michael Jackson pose, spinning rock n’ roll magic in a pair of low-slung jeans, suiting up a la James Bond and staring down from billboards bare-shouldered, tousle-haired when he launched his menswear line seven odd years ago. I ask him for photographs from some of his older ad campaigns and he laughs. “Those are too old and nudey. I’d rather that my photographs reflect who I am today.”

A boot camp for fashion

Ammar, today, is a student of fashion with his eyes set firmly on the global market. “In Pakistan, designing Western women’s wear was self-indulgent on my part,” he explains. “I truly loved doing it but it had a very limited market as compared to my menswear. I was the only fish in the sea here and I couldn’t possibly expand my horizons when I barely faced any competition.

“The only way I could hope to grow as a designer and expand my customer-base was by entering into a market where there was greater competition and demand for the kind of designs I made. Parsons’ alumni include the likes of Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan. The school’s students get to intern with established design houses — last summer, I interned with Philip Lim — and when I graduate, I will get the chance to showcase my work at New York Fashion Week. I couldn’t have hoped for a better platform.”

It’s no easy platform, though. The Parsons’ regimen, according to Ammar, is a veritable boot camp for fashion. “I’d never had my work trashed the way it has been at Parsons,” he smiles. “The school accepts promising students but then pushes them until they realise their potential. In Pakistan, I was touted as a minimalist but at Parsons, those very designs were considered over-the-top in the most Bollywood way. My fellow students are from places like Norway, Germany and Japan and they give minimalism a whole new meaning!

“Studying design from a new perspective has humbled me and made me work harder. A school like Parsons provides designers with the exposure and experience that can help them in eventually making it big internationally. Manish Arora joined into Paco Rabanne and it’s about time our designers also set foot into the Western arena. We certainly have the talent and making do by taking part in government-sponsored events abroad is just not enough. And the only way to make a mark internationally is by studying — and working — there.”

Ordinarily extraordinary

Undeniably, a fashion design degree from Parsons is extremely prestigious. The school accepts only about 18 students every year with just 10 managing to eventually graduate. Ammar’s braved the odds and graduates this summer, but even as he steers his career forward isn’t life in New York difficult for him and wife Aaminah Haq? The transition from being celebrities in Pakistan to a normal, relatively anonymous existence in New York couldn’t have been easy.

“The anonymity is probably what we enjoy the most,” Ammar mulls. “Even when we lived in Lahore, Aaminah and I enjoyed living ordinary lives. Both of us love what we do while fame is just a consequence of it. It certainly has never been the motive behind us choosing our particular careers. Still, we don’t resent being well-known faces in Pakistan. In New York, though, it is just such fun for us to leave home and buy groceries without having to worry about how we look. In Pakistan, we live sheltered lives where we move about in our particular circles, never really getting to meet people outside our own social networks. Here, I can just sit in the subway or walk down the street, meeting and talking to random people. The randomness of it all is very refreshing!”

“Of course we miss our families… who doesn’t?” Ammar ponders. “But there are different shades to being lonely. In Pakistan, I always felt lonely in my career. Other designers who created Western women’s wear made ends meet by switching every now and then to lucrative bridals. I was the only designer who was successful with his menswear but kept succumbing to creative urges to design Western wear for women. Here, starting over in New York, I am certainly not lonely in my career path.”

From a life cluttered with red carpets, ‘it’ parties and a huge social circle, Aaminah and Ammar now live with just their pet cat for company. Children aren’t yet on the cards — and Ammar cleverly deflects any questions on that topic, “All personal questions have to be directed to my wife.” Aaminah is, naturally, esconced away in New York and not available for comment. For the longest time, they laid on the glamorama at major red carpet events and they’re still spinning the same magic. Ammar’s current work at Parsons reflects a zany sophistication, with his wife working her best at the styling.

And even as he gets older, wiser, and more prolific as a designer, he retains his intrinsic edge and his penchant for the extraordinary. For Parsons, he may suit up a female model in multicolors but she’ll be mustached and bespectacled or he’ll conjure up a ‘lost’ scenario with a waif-like model dressed in classic Sophie Hallette lace. It’s all quintessential Ammar Belal; the music, the play of light and shade, the experimentation with makeup and hair. Come September, he brings it all to the catwalk at New York Fashion Week. From thereon… who knows… the world?