WHAT WE LOVED

Retail’s the key

The year was happily dotted with designer retail stores opening up. This summer the erstwhile but very talented Feeha Jamshed set up her first store in Karachi’s fashionable E-Street, finally bringing her modern, minimalist vibe to accessible retail racks. Later in the year, Wardha Saleem launched her first flagship store in Karachi; a technicolour space brimming with quirky colour and indigenous inspirations that define the designer’s very unique ethos.

Traversing the fast narrowing Karachi-Lahore divide, Zara Shahjahan set up two shiny, savvy shops in Karachi while Misha Lakhani brought her understated glamour to Lahore. City-hopping at the very tail-end of the year, HSY has just opened the doors to his glorious Karachi ‘mansion’, where clients will be able to order bespoke garments, to be followed in 2016 with his first retail store in the city.

What gets shown on the catwalk needs to ultimately be available for retail. It’s great that more and more designers are recognising this rather obvious business strategy.

One wonders, though, how well multi-fashion stores will fare now that many of the designers who stocked with them have launched outlets of their own. Perhaps we’ll know, in 2016.

Faraz Manan takes on Dubai

From being one of the country’s most coveted bridal couturiers, Faraz Manan has spread his wings onwards to international waters. His varnished new store opened in Dubai this October, launched with a fashion show that featured the embellished, intricate pastels that have become his forte.

Fashion waltzed onto a brand new platform with cinema spiraling into an all-out revival. Who better to add oomph to fashion than cinema’s brand new sirens?

A standalone designer-wear store in Dubai’s international fairground places Pakistani fashion ostensibly on the map. It is also testament to Faraz’s success as a designer who has paved his own path. He lives in Lahore but has long opted not to showcase at the Lahore-based Pakistan Fashion Design Council’s (PFDC) fashion weeks, hosting successful private shows of his own. He also rules the lawn market with his very successful seasonal collections and if that’s not enough, he has us star-struck with the occasional images he posts of himself with ‘good friends’ Kareena and Karisma Kapoor.

Fashion’s Swarovski affair

Taking flight from a glitzy launch in Pakistan in late 2014, local fashion’s trysts with Swarovski continued. In March 2015, the Swarovski Couture Weekend took place in Lahore, featuring designer-wear incorporated with Swarovski crystals and wrapping up the year was Pakistani fashion’s participation in the very illustrious Swarovski Sparkling Couture exhibit in Dubai. Six local designers interspersed embroideries and fabric with generous smatterings of Swarovski crystals, holding their own amongst a large international contingent.

Swarovski, of course, has long orchestrated collaborations with fashion designers across the world. 2015’s bejeweled affairs bode well for similar — perhaps even more exciting — future projects in Pakistan.

Lauding local craft

Pakistan’s rich indigenous heritage unfurled in its many variations at the ‘A Flower From Every Meadow’ at Karachi’s Mohatta Palace. Painstakingly curated by the Mohatta Palace Museum’s Director Nasreen Askari, the exhibit traversed the myriad cultures that exist within the country; from the bridal shawls of Tharparkar to the ajrak of Sindh, the woolen carpets woven high up in the mountainous regions and interpretations of local craft and trends by modern-day popular designers. It was a journey through the country that inspired awe and highlighted Pakistan’s many artisans.

In a similar vein, the Chairperson of the Pakistan Fashion Design Council (PFDC), Sehyr Saigol, announced plans to construct a Design District that would endeavour to laud local craft and collaborate it into modern fashion. The initiative, which is still a work in progress, will be bringing together designers, textile mill and local artisans. The PFDC is also working on the creation of a Textile Museum which will display heirlooms from Pakistan’s textile history as well as present-day designs.

Our unique, diverse craftsmanship, after all, is one of our foremost assets. The year 2015 highlighted the need to sustain and nurture local craft, lest it dies an untimely death at the hands of quick, cost-effective — but ultimately, generic — machine embellishments.

The LSAs return … with a bang!

The country’s oldest, arguably most credible awards returned with a massive, rejuvenating bang. Shrugging away former predilections for understated affairs, the Lux Style Awards (LSAs) pulled out all stops with a grand ceremony, complete with celebrity performances, spurts of humour, red carpet glamour and controversy.

Nomi Ansari won Achievement in Fashion Design — Bridal, Amna Ilyas and Shehzad Noor scored Best Female and Male Model respectively, Ismail Farid won for his menswear, Sadaf Kanwal was Best Emerging Talent, NFK Photography won in the Best Fashion Photographer category while Nabila, predictably, bagged the Best Hair and Make-up Artist accolade. It was designer duo Sana Safinaz’s hat-trick win, though, that raised eyebrows and sparked off conflict. Sweeping the Achievement in Pret, Luxury-pret and Lawn categories, talks were rife on should they have won, who could have won, the whys, hows and what-nots.

Post-award debates, after all, are what make the LSAs so highly anticipated. It’s great to have the awards back, restored to their former glory with all the razzle, dazzle and magic that has always made them so special.

Make-up at the forefront

Sweeping into a market clustered with international contenders was a range of local makeup products especially devised for the Pakistani skin. Masarrat Misbah’s MM Halal Make-up range boasted healthy, skin-friendly ingredients while Nabila introduced the ‘No Make-up’ palette, miraculously creating an effortless, no make-up look with an all-in-one ingenious make-up box.

Internationally, Mehrbano Sethi’s Luscious Cosmetics made inroads when it began retailing at the gargantuan global make-up chain, Sephora. The company apparently has further expansion planned out and is also promising the introduction of interesting new ranges.

And make-up certainly went wacky at Nabila’s much-publicised Halloween party where ‘it’ girls and celebs were transformed into ghouls and hoodlums. All this, coupled with quite a few fashion weeks where styling by Nabila took center stage, made 2015 a year when make-up was in the forefront.

Cinema meets fashion

Fashion waltzed onto a brand new platform with cinema spiraling into an all-out revival. Who better to add oomph to fashion than cinema’s brand new sirens? In a varied selection of designer wear, Mahira Khan, Sohai Ali Abro, Humaima Malik, Mehwish Hayat, Armeena Rana Khan and Ayesha Omer, among others, posed and preened on the red carpet and on-screen, looking better than ever.

Muse, Feeha Jamshed, Ali Xeeshan, Sana Safinaz, Sania Maskatiya and Elan were some of the brands that one spotted at cinema premieres, soundtrack launches and glitzy after parties. If designers’ quotes are anything to go by, sales often rocketed when a popular starlet’s images filtered onto social media in their designs.

There really is no business like show business and the business of fashion works proportionally to it. Pakistan’s fresh new cinematic wave is very, very savvy and we’re loving it!

The entry of the online tailor

Why bother cajoling the darzi into efficiency when fabric can be stitched, ordered and delivered to your doorstep? In a heroic attempt to eliminate no-good, persistently erroneous tailors, online stitching services wound their way into cyber-space in 2015.

The concept may still be in its nascent stages in Pakistan but it has already gained popularity with multi-fashion store Labels launching the ‘Stitch My Fabric’ website and Darzi Express latching onto clientele of its own. Convenient and no-fuss, the online tailor’s entry is long overdue and certainly very welcome. 

AND HERE’S WHAT WE DIDN’T LIKE

Modelling lows

The entry of the short, stumpy model was an unwelcome, unfathomable development. We know that new talent needs to be nurtured and these girls may be very enthusiastic about their fledgling professions. We can also surmise just how tempting it must be to hire these girls considering that they charge very little compared to their established counterparts. But isn’t being tall and thin a fundamental requirement of the modeling profession?

Fortunately, some of fashion’s best lot of hotsteppers continued to feature at recent fashion weeks — the very stylish Amna Babar, statuesque Fauzia Aman, Sadaf Kanwal who has made thick brows such an all-out trend, smoky-eyed Rabia Butt and Mehreen Syed who excels in carrying ornate bridal wear. The inevitable few aging models were also present, but fortunately their number is now receding with most of them having the good sense to move on other careers as they grow older.

Amongst this very graceful lot there were new girls who lacked the figures to carry off a mini or had designers in a flurry trying to tweak dress lengths to suit their shorter heights. What’s the point of a catwalk showcase if it features models that can’t carry clothes well? A definite low for 2015.

Inspiration or imitation?

Copycat designers were caught out one after the other. Relatively new designer Nida Khurram raised a brouhaha when she got much too ‘inspired’ by artists from Milan, London and NYC, transferring their art-work onto apparel. It instigated a long-winded debate on the fine line that divides inspiration and imitation with umpteen images of fashion plagiarism floating onto social media.

Fashion’s stepped up its pace, with local brands ricocheting from showcases at umpteen fashion weeks to seasonal collections to festival-oriented designs and unstitched summer lawn designs. In the rat-race to constantly deliver, many designers have begun losing out on their creativity. They meander, instead, to the runways of international fashion weeks, the bling of Bollywood across the border, the easily accessible online designs at Pinterest or even, the masterful creations of local fashion’s arguably most-copied designer, the long-suffering Bunto Kazmi.

Caught out later in the year was an increasing milieu of popular designer labels; ranging from Sapphire to Nishat Linen, Sana Safinaz and Zara Shahjahan lawn. Some had tweaked the designs they had copied, making them somewhat different. Many others had replicated them to the tee. Considering how frequently they are getting caught out by nifty bloggers and Instagrammers, local designers’ penchant for plagiarism is surprising.

Why forsake the integrity of your brand just in order to create multiple collections for successive fashion weeks? And is a week of sold-out sales worth the long-term humiliation of being exposed for plagiarism? That’s a point to ponder, come 2016.

Fashion weeks galore

Sandwiched closely together, multiple fashion weeks dotted 2015’s roster ranging from Style360’s Telenor Bridal Couture Week to Fashion Pakistan Week, PFDC Sunsilk Fashion Week, PFDC L’Oreal Paris Bridal Couture Week and even Karachi Fashion Week — Men’s Fashion 2015. Fashion ennui quickly, unaviodably, crept in, with every collection looking like the other and hardly any new trends being set. One even wondered if any business was actually being generated for designers through these successive events or if they were simply just organized for TV viewership and in order to raise media mileage for sponsors.

One or two seasonal events — instead of many — presenting well-edited, trendsetting collections may actually be able to steer the business of fashion towards more constructive, lucrative realms. It’s high time fashion weeks’ many organisers realise this.

The fall of social media

If one went by reviews on social media, Pakistani fashion in 2015 was perpetually ‘fabulous’, ‘gorgeous’ and ‘sensational’. A closer look at the designs being described made one beg to differ. With paid content becoming more and more common on social media, standards of fashion critique have quickly plummeted. It has lead to some very boring reviews, inaccurate opinions and unnecessarily bloated egos as members of the fashion fraternity get elevated to social media celebrities simply because they pay for the publicity via blogs.

Bloggers and Instagrammers all over the world get paid for boosting brands but in order to retain integrity, they need to strike a balance between bias and genuine coverage. It’s a tricky line to walk but one that is increasingly necessary.

Sale mania

Fistfights and screaming matches ensued when the very popular Sapphire held its first anniversary sale. Everybody wanted to get their hands on the subsidised clothes and they were willing to shove, kick and throttle salesmen if they had to. Some rather horrific videos from the sale, captured via cellphones and posted onto Facebook, quickly became viral. These were followed a few days later with more videos; of women screaming at Khaadi’s sale and breaking open the doors at Agha Noor.

It is all indicative of the country’s increasing predilection for fashionable ready-to-wear. But must women jostle and scream for the clothes that they need, reducing themselves to laughing stocks? It must have been a high-earning week for Sapphire, we’re sure … but a low for 2015.

Fashion’s mediocre tangent

In the quest to rake in sales, designers are fast losing out on their creativity. The recent onslaught of fashion weeks are a case in point, where hardly any new trends were set or memorable statements were made. The focus, sadly, was far too much on commerce.

The year 2015 was marred by designer line-ups that were pretty but repetitive, retail-friendly but mundane. Fashion’s mediocre tangent may currently be appeasing customers but in the long run, it will only bring down brands’ high-fashion value, reducing them to the commonplace. The business of fashion does need to earn profits but it needs to revive the creative energy that was once its je na sais quo. Mediocrity, ultimately, bleeds creativity. 2015’s biggest fashion low, undoubtedly.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine January 3rd, 2015