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March 16, 2006
PROFILE
Yahsir Waheed
Designer par excellence
This slim-statured, non-competitive designer is secure in his own identity as the creator of signature prints, each one registered separately, to guarantee their originality, writes Shehar Bano Khan
Yahsir Waheed is a fairly content textile designer. Not the one to follow the cost-effectiveness of the mass production, each season the designer launches between 10 to 12 prints to gratify the market niche of his label. This time of the year is especially busy as he is constantly shuttling between Lahore and Faisalabad to personally supervise his work.
From Faisalabad, where his fabric is printed and manufactured, the designer rushes back to Lahore in the same week to fulfill his lecture commitment at the Pakistan School of Fashion Design. His recent appointment as the School’s dean has, no doubt, put him in a highly respectable genre of designers by default. But what defines his exclusivity does not come entirely from designing vividly bold fabric prints; it comes from acknowledging the career breakthroughs of his students with the same punch of enthusiasm as his own.
“I’m very happy for my students who’ve made it big in the fashion industry. I’m not the one for cutthroat ambition and don’t believe in trying to belittle the success of others. If anything, we need competition which is healthy and as a teacher I feel really good if one of my students’ designs is placed next to mine in a shop,” says Waheed.
A non-ambitious, or let us say, a non-cutthroat designer bona fide welcoming the inroads of other designers, would be seen by many as countering inherent mediocrity in the face of competition. Yahsir Waheed feels that the mediocrity phenomenon is nothing more than an absence of faith in your own self. “My designs are intended for everybody and appeal to those willing to spend affordable price for shalwar kameez. Fashion, or designer labels should not be exclusive to a few only. You’ll see for yourself how my prints are affordable. We’ve even done away with the three-piece concept of selling shalwar, kameez and dupatta. In fact, I was the one who first started kameez-dupatta with white shalwars. That’s what fashion is supposed to do. It should appeal to the majority,” reasons Waheed.
Waheed’s textile studio is a small entrepreneurial venture operating since 1999. For the past eight years the company has been successfully producing and marketing printed lawn for female clothing to become one of the first private designer labels of the country.
Coming from a family of doctors, Yahsir was expected to follow the profession of his father and grandfather. His penchant for absorbing sciences ended at biology and after doing his FSc from the Government College, Lahore, he decided to sit for the National College of Arts’ entrance exams. “At that time you were considered a loser if you went into art but thankfully my parents were really supportive and understood how I loved drawing,” says Waheed.
A textile major from the National College of Arts did not come as an automatic permit to pioneer designer label fabric. The degree needed to be professionally viable to ensure the credibility of textile designing as opposed to medicine. Waheed took up work at a well-known textile company. “Initially, after doing my majors from the NCA, I progressed into knitwear designing, dabbling in other fields and slowly moved towards fashion. But textile has always been my passion. At the back of my mind I always wanted to have a line which was my own, and finally my business partner and I formed Brimful Designs in 1999 under which I started the my line.”
He and his managing partner, Yahya Mansoor, filed a lawsuit against a Faisalabad-based businessman who was raking profit through the copying and selling of their designs. “We didn’t want to sit and let somebody wipe us out of business. We intended to set a precedent to stop piracy,” asserts Waheed
Yahsir Waheed can rightfully be grouped with those designers who framed the identity of Pakistan’s fashion industry. The early period of the `90s was the time when the fashion industry was waking up to the call of a market waiting to be discovered by local designers set to establish fashion’s future course.
Waheed happened to be among those who wanted to personalise style without compromising on originality. Shalwar kameez was no longer an uninspiring ensemble of clothing dictating conservatism. It was evolving to define the various tones of femininity using versatility for expression. But his first independent venture to use clothes as an expression of change did not fare well.
Launched under the label of ‘Aine no Corrida’, Yahsir Waheed’s knitwear line went unnoticed, so did his potential as a designer. “This was in early 1992 when I started this very modern and western knitwear line for young men and women. I ran that for almost three years before getting involved in establishing the Pakistan School of Fashion Design.”
His future grand plans include delving into garments and resurrecting his knitwear line. “We feel that now that my label is recognised with a universal appeal the risk of starting something on the lines of my knitwear clothes is low,” claims the designer.
“Designing is different from art because a designer should know his market and be able to sell. The biggest challenge for me is to make sure that each of my prints is unique. I think that’s the reason for their mass appeal.”
While the mass appeal has pushed Yahsir Waheed to become a must-label to wear, his designs have unfortunately become a major source of revenue for counterfeit design sellers. In 2003 backwater shops situated in Ichra and the Cavalry Ground were selling a Yahsir Waheed print for half of the original price.
“We face a near extinction and loss of company’s reputation. Over the course of seven years, our carefully cultivated reputation was being destroyed through this blatant and massive illegal copying of our original designs. We also felt a rapid decline in market share, brand negativity and the loss of our product’s novel appeal,” recalls Waheed.
He and his managing partner, Yahya Mansoor filed a lawsuit against a Faisalabad based businessman who was raking profit through the copying and selling of their designs. Unlike Waheed and his business partner, other designers and textile owners hardly gave any thought to the infringement of their designs. Laws such as the Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and their violation caused no major setbacks to their mass production. Neither did they care about the major industrial piracy network operating in Pakistan.
“We didn’t want to sit and let somebody wipe us out of business. We intended to set a precedent to stop piracy,” asserts Waheed.
They succeeded in doing just that and sought a court injunction against the person copying the designs. Never before had anybody been taken to court for imitating designs. Waheed’s is the first company in the textile industry to challenge ethics of the local market economy. “It’s a complex network of collaboration where everybody, from the businessmen down to the sellers, is involved. It’s difficult to stop them completely but at least we’ve managed to put up a fight.”
Referring to his company as a small enterprise, Yahsir Waheed is in no rush to conquer the neighbouring Indian market. Most of his contemporaries can be seen partaking in the stampede to collaborate with or be recognized by the huge Indian market, Waheed’s personal work code prevents him from taking that step.
“Last November I was in India making enquiries about the fashion industry, which no doubt is huge there. I don’t have any immediate plans to start anything in India. Besides I seriously think there’s an identity crisis there. Look at Bollywood! As a designer I’m shocked at the kind of clothes, if they can be called clothes, they wear in videos and movies. They are trying to copy the West with no apologies. In comparison, there’s less of an identity crisis here.”
Debatable as that might sound; the slim-statured, non-competitive designer is secure in his own identity as the creator of signature prints, each one registered separately to guarantee their originality. “I follow my own culture of aesthetics and the uniqueness of my designs is part of that,” asserts Yahsir Waheed.
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