Daily Times

Nightly showers have washed the 80-year-old neem visible from my window a resplendent green. Continuing to spread its largesse for pedestrian and resident alike, it appears to show no signs of ageing. The mangoes in the neighbour’s garden, heavy with the promise of eventual ripeness, brace themselves for the predictable pre-summer brutal squalls that will rip the green fruit from their branches. Only a small amount will survive and that is the lesson nature teaches us, provided we are willing to listen.

The country was recently flooded by an unprecedented onslaught of summer fabrics. Much like the bountifully laden mango, everyone and their kith and kin appeared to have metamorphosed into textile experts. The city’s roadsides and towering billboards played host to Indian and local models sporting the latest in designer lawns and summer wear, while the frenzied buying witnessed at up-market stores belied the image of the country as a poverty-stricken state. That Pakistan is emerging as a hub for locally produced and designed fine fabric is an enormously encouraging prospect. If reports from across the border in the first ever Pakistan Lifestyle Expo at Pragati Maidan in Delhi are anything to go by, we should be in a position to attract a large number of potential buyers for our apparel fabrics. This bodes well for our textile sector, but for sustained industrial growth and volume availability for trade, there has to be a drastic reduction in the relentless and destructive load shedding that the country is experiencing. No amount of inspired initiatives will help if we cannot produce the volume required by importers.

While fashion fabrics are making a mark, our designers, some of whom already have a presence in the global market, have unified under councils to provide ready platforms for showcasing their work. One of the founding members and pioneers in the country’s fashion industry, Sehyr Saigal, heads the Lahore-based Pakistan Fashion Design Council, which recently organised a four-day fashion week at the Lahore Expo Centre. A splendid affair, painstakingly organised at the best possible venue for such an event, Ms Saigal and her team are to be congratulated on the effort made to brand Pakistani fashion. Foreign buyers and journalists, local press and media jostled with local fashionistas to view models strut their stuff for over 30 designers. That this high impact, high revenue-generating activity should be planned, undertaken and executed by the private sector is an inexcusable lapse on the part of the government.

Ms Saigal, on the other hand, launched the first Pakistani up-market publication under her brand name Libas in the early 1980s. Ms Saigal and I ( then as resident editor), pioneering ‘the business of fashion’ agenda, and setting world class standards for fashion publications to emulate, partnered with the media savvy then minister of information, Javed Jabbar, for the marathon Ad Asia festival held in Lahore in 1984.

No subsequent event has matched the detailing, execution or positive image building of the country since. Contrary to popular opinion, fashion is neither frivolous nor the domain of a few. It is a multi-billion dollar industry in which trillions of dollars roam the world for investment each year. The global fashion industry is expected to continue its upward spiral and is calculated to have reached a value of $ 1,781.7 billion by the end of last year.

In the wake of the aggressive vision of Abu Shamim Ariff, then Secretary Commerce, and Ismail Qureshi, another civil servant posted as Economics Affairs Attaché at Pakistan’s Embassy in Paris, who wooed the French fashion world personally, the ministry of commerce established Pakistan’s first School of Fashion Design at Lahore. Affiliated with La Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, Paris, and inaugurated by French designer Olivier Lapidus, the School set out to train designers in couture. Awarded a Charter recently, the Institute now offers diverse disciplines in design, the most eminent being jewelry.

As the Principal, Pakistan School of Fashion Design for over four years, one had constantly argued for a prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) rather than an haute couture focus. It was heartening therefore to see that the Pakistan Fashion Design Council had chosen a ready-to-wear rather than a bridal or couture theme for the recent event. What remained unaddressed however is the fact that despite the fact that business and production models have registered paradigm shifts globally, the institution has not raised the bar in innovation or quality. The selected toiles and actual outfits shown were sadly missing the exacting and stringent standards demanded by the fashion world in general and the French in particular. Arguably, it was student work, but the argument posited during my tenure that fashion is created in the atelier as much as it is in the laboratory still holds true. It is never enough to take existing materials and design around them — the essence of global fashion lies in the creation of the fabric itself.

In Pakistan and in this respect, i.e. of innovation in fabric, the ready-to-wear field has benefited vastly from Ms Saigal’s pioneering aesthetics and marketing knowhow. With her unique screen prints produced in limited quantity over the years, Libas created a huge demand locally and internationally. Disappointingly, at the fashion week, only Kamiar Rokni’s ethereal prints in an old rose, clotted cream sparked with lime, and a deep burgundy palette, with jackets and palazzo pants cut to precision, accessorised with a mix and match shoe line, made the bar required for an international collection. For the rest, though there were individual pieces in each designer’s repertoire, none could qualify as a collection worthy of export. What makes a Chanel outfit unique and worth the money one pays for it is not so much the signature cut of jacket or skirt (which may be copied), but the fabric, which is one of the best-kept trade secrets that any company can safeguard.

With the development of media and the internet, consumers are becoming savvier and more demanding. With multiple choices in quality, design and price available, apparel manufacturers are being forced to adopt new techniques to increase trade. Consequently, there is a relentless pressure to produce better and more innovative fashion designs, textiles and marketing models. Yet, some countries have forged ahead. Towards the end of 2006, China had captured as much as 65 percent of the global market share in total apparel exports. Bangladesh, which grows no cotton indigenously, surpassed Pakistan’s export performance. Admittedly, the rise (fall?) of the Pakistani industry has been affected by external factors such as exchange rates, petrol prices, the energy crisis and country-specific political situations.

The way forward for Pakistan lies in establishing a close-knit relationship between the textile and fashion industries. One of the major challenges lies in responding to the world’s demand for eco-friendly and bio-gradable fabrics. During training in Japan, one was struck by the exquisite drape and cut of Issey Miyake’s designs as much as the beautiful test fabrics created from potato peelings and sugarcane. This is not to say that we do not have our own unique take on global fashion. Here at home, samples of naturally ‘green’ cotton grown in areas of Multan were viewed with reverence by the visiting French faculty.

One of the marketing models that Pakistan could consider is that of Brazil. Amongst the BRIC bloc, it is the only country that has a booming fashion industry. This has not been achieved overnight and is a result of a healthy macro-economic industry, which has allowed for steady expansion over a number of years. Despite the world recession set in motion in 2008, Brazil’s economy registered a nine percent increase in its GDP in 2010. More than anything else, it is Brazil’s self-reliance that is proving to be the country’s greatest asset. As Sara Andrade, the fashion editor of Vogue, Portugal, says, “One of the things Brazil has working for it is that it’s a country that really supports their own — their own production, their own artists, and even their own trade. That makes it less dependent on other countries.”

Truer words could not be said. While the Pakistan Fashion Design Council’s strategy, supported only by the private corporate sector, is the first step in the right direction, it is for government to now step in to strengthen and support the efforts of the Council in cash and kind. Until that happens, kudos to the PFDC and its corporate sponsors for an excellent show.

The writer is Academic Advisor Lahore Grammar School and can be reached at navidshahzad@hotmail.com