In her 14 years-long career, Khadijah Shah can be credited for creating some great collections, setting trends in motion, shaking up the high street and helming some beautiful fashion shoots. Her carefully curated fashion shows are rendered memorable through extensive, carefully planned social media marketing. The lawn catalogues, shot in exotic locales round the world, have always been advertised rampantly. And so on. Khadijah’s great at what she does, but she’s also great at making the world at large aware of all that she has achieved.
The weekend that I meet her, for instance, she is just about to open a glossy new store for her brand Elan. Images of the interiors, created by Yousaf Shahbaz, are flitting over social media: the elaborate chandeliers, glistening black-and-white parquet floors and quirky detailing on the walls. The new ‘Maison Elan’ is beautiful, and everyone knows this thanks to the images on Instagram.
This is also the weekend when she has impetuously flung herself into controversy. Pinpointing a young Lahore-based brand for replicating her designs to the tee, she has been ranting about unethical copycats in local fashion. She has posted these commentaries via Insta-stories, an option on Instagram in which posts disappear into cyberspace after 24 hours. This is still ample time, though, for Khadijah’s posts, which show Elan’s designs placed next to that of the other brand, to be screenshot rampantly and passed about on WhatsApp groups.
How would the other brand react, it was wondered. Quite predictably, it didn’t react at all. This could be construed as an admission of guilt or, at least, a defence mechanism. Khadijah would never refrain from calling out a copycat designer should he or she be naïve enough to respond to her with wishy-washy explanations. Hell truly hath no fury like a Khadijah Shah scorned … when she feels that she has been wronged.
Khadijah Shah knows how to make waves and build brands. As much as her design skills, it’s her acumen for marketing that really stands out
And yet, for all her refined aesthetics, marketing skills and vociferous dislike for plagiarism, Khadijah has faced her share of ups and downs. Her brand, Elan, may be a fashion favourite but a large number of copycat brands are constantly trying to plagiarise her designs, trying to somehow tap into her clientele. And a year-and-a-half ago, amidst much talk, she had parted ways with high-street brand Sapphire. This was a brand that she had built from scratch, moulding it to her vision as it had expanded from one store to another, one collection to another. I remember meeting Khadijah right after she had left Sapphire. There had been a resigned sadness about her at the time, and she had told me that she was still trying to come to terms with how things had ended.
Today, she is happier. There are other brands that she has managed to build since then, other stores that she has opened, newer plans that she has chalked. “I’m lucky, I suppose,” she tells me. “Whenever I try out something new, it gets accepted wholeheartedly by people.”
Could this possibly be because of her lineage, I ask. Khadijah belongs to one of Lahore’s oldest families and it must help to have friends in all the right places. “Yes, but how many times would those friends buy from me just in order to oblige me?” she asks. “It takes hard work and skill to build a long-lasting brand with a strong customer base.”