Pakistan’s fashion industry

The current state of Pakistan’s fashion scene . ILLUSTRATION: ESSAH MALIK

In Pakistan, designers have failed to draw inspiration from the society. For them, fashion has been mostly about aesthetically pleasing hues, flattering cuts and flairs. Fashion experts have hardly used their creations to express worldviews influenced by the public. This is a stark contrast to fashion trends in the West, where fashion — especially haute couture — is not so different from art and other avenues of creative expression. One needs to only look as far back as the hippie craze of the 60s and 70s to note the way in which socially relevant ideas like gender equality, sexual freedom and peace were prominent themes in popular fashion consciousness. .
Zara Raza, a fashion entrepreneur and part CEO of L’aatelier Boutique, blame commercial appeal as the cause of static demand for a similar. “The problem with experimental themes in Pakistan is that they work better for fashion weeks ,” explains Raza.
When it comes to high-end pert from top-tier designers, the latest collections end up, along with simultaneous near-knockoffs, at overpriced multi-label stores that sell only to a select clientele. It’s this small, yet very stable niche market for pert or ready-to-wear designer labels, that have made it very difficult for new and innovative trends to penetrate the market with the same efficacy as popular and reasonably priced outlet stores abroad, like H&M or Zara.
“You’ve got your queens and kings of the fashion industry catering for the elite like Sana Safinaz and Perwani,” added Raza, implying that the rest of the Pakistani designers were too busy replicating these fashion stalwarts.
Thus, Pakistani experimentation with fashion has been limited to the reinvigoration of traditional clothing  or western fusions,  Amar Belal and Zaheer Abbas.
Quite recently there has been an effort to infuse local fashion with an indigenous context. Uth Oye! and Gulabo, have created  t-shirts which sport desi themes and logos, inspired by Lollywood  And Tayyab Bombal and Adnan Pardesy, to name a few have recently used interesting patterns in their military-inspired jackets or camouflage pants.
Nowadays the ubiquitous surfeit of lawn designs defines our fashion industry.
Thus, fashion as a vehicle for expressing ideas and personal creativity, sadly remains an uncharted territory in Pakistan. The change has to come from the top. The royalty of the fashion industry can surely resuscitate the creativity in Pakistan’s fashion scene. They just need to momentarily sacrifice their commercial pursuits and focus on work which has sociopolitical resonance. After all, powerful art with the capacity to cause change is not just a chooridar, a lawn print or a hybrid East-West fusion kurta.