Lifestyle - Pen-pricks in Pakistan

HINDOL SENGUPTA


Pakistan has a vibrant fashion press because of the absence of glossies whose ad revenues depend solely on the fashion houses.

Deflating the Dahling bubble: Editors Faiza Samee and Andleeb Rana (left).


Ten years after I started to write on fashion in India, I went to Pakistan to meet pen-pricks across the border.

Fashion journalism is one of the toughest forms of journalism — yes, of course you don’t agree — simply because it is one of the rare spaces where the people who create what is being reviewed also have the power of access.

A film critic does not need a press screening to review the film. An art or food critic can review anonymously but a fashion critic needs access to the shows. The shows are always by-invitation only.

I knew one fashion scribe when I went to Karachi — Andleeb Rana, who, after years as the country’s most powerful style scribbler, has launched her own fashion magazine, Xpoze, a fortnightly that regularly shreds pretensions and reputations.


Many similarities

Now the Pakistan fashion industry is smaller than the Indian fashion industry but there are many similarities. Pakistan has two (or is it three?) fashion councils and guess what, India has three too.

Pakistan doesn’t have a fashion week yet (no, what I saw as the Karachi Fashion Week really does not count) and India has three (one each season) and one more as couture week and now I hear that there will be a men’s fashion week too. That will give us in India a grand, trumpeting eight fashion weeks in a year — surely a world record?

The reasons why Pakistan has so many councils in fashion is the same as in India. It is called designer ego. Ego, quite like in the movies, needs regular massage and can hardly adjust with other, similarly inflated, egos.

And Pakistan, I discovered, has sabre-sharp pens, as effective and evocative as any in India. In fact, they are sharper than anything I have read recently in India.

Fashion journalism in India has lost its singe a bit after the pens of editors like Kanika Gahlaut, my favourite diva of diatribe, retired a bit from fashion (though Kanika is recently back with an internationally quoted critique of a Vogue shoot that deflates the eternal sunshine of the spotless minds of fashion glossies with chest-thumping aplomb).

There is too much back-patting in Indian fashion nowadays and the front row seat power of an increasing number of fashion glossies (who are natural bed-partners of the fashion labels because they get all the advertising from them) means that designers can get away deriding journalists who critique. After all they have the pretty boy crowd on their side.

Very few fashion glossies have real writers (Bandana Tewari of the Vogue in India is a rare intelligence) and most “journalists” there are glorified stylists.

Also, since most fashion stylists (even if they call themselves journalists) usually are not the most potent business analyst brains in the business, designers can get away with any bragging without having to answer any tough questions about whether anyone really wears their clothes and where their numbers are coming from.

That’s why Pakistan is such a relief. There is criticism, acute I may add, in fashion in Pakistan. The absence of the fashion glossies means that there are normal (and normally vicious) journalists on the front row. Fashion scribes scissor away with such dexterity that there is no real fear of ego balloons floating merrily in the air-kissed air.

The industry is much smaller and far more steeped in traditional clothing than in India and therefore there is far more fodder for journalists as lookalike ensembles sashay down the runway.

It is intriguing to see the same debate in Pakistan that India used to have — and indeed continues to have — in all these years that we have had a fashion council (the Fashion Design Council of India celebrates 10 years this year) — how much is too much ethnicity? Can heritage also be hip? Is embroidery our only legacy? And if it is the overwhelming legacy, then do we look at reinventing it?

In all this debate, it of course helps that people like Andleeb happily point out plagiarism and put reputations through the shredder. This means that Pakistan today has a more vibrant fashion press than India. The critique is sharper and front row politics, while full of vim and vigour I’m sure, hasn’t reached the cacophony that it has in India.

Also, there are far less international labels in Pakistan. So attention on home-grown labels has not been deflected by the lust for Gucci, Prada and Chanel. Pakistanis usually buy their foreign labels from foreign-land and at home they concentrate on demanding and indeed getting value for money from their designers.

That of course does not mean that everything that is tom-tommed on the runway is inspired. I saw a bit of the Karachi Fashion Week which was enough to convince me otherwise but the happy thing is that the pencils on the front row are being sharpened even as the bows are taken.


Takes more courage

This, it must be said, is tougher for Pakistani journalists than their Indian counterparts. I mean I have been threatened (by a dear designer) with sacking (“I know your boss!”) but today, I know few designers personally and the ones I do, I have known for years, so they do not take criticism personally. There are just too many designers in India to know a lot of people intimately, so the fear of them becoming one’s “friend” doesn’t, thankfully, exist.

But the Pakistani fashion circle is much smaller so the few scribes tend to know the few designers rather well. This, of course, means that it takes far more courage — more shrug-off ability, if you will — to deflate the “dahling bubble”. It becomes tougher if you are going to bump into each other in every party, every day.

That’s why I loved hopping across the border and taking a peep at their pen-pricks — they always seem to draw a bit of delicious blood.

Hindol Sengupta is Editor, Lifestyle, with UTVi.