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Thursday March 28, 2024

The senselessness of (most) Pakistani fashion

Islamabad diaryFashion makes sense if it has general applicability. What is it worth if it has no mass appeal or doesn’t influence the way ordinary men and women dress? Do the high priests of Pakistani fashion have anything better to do than design bridal dresses?Half the fashion shows whose pictures

By Ayaz Amir
May 08, 2015
Islamabad diary
Fashion makes sense if it has general applicability. What is it worth if it has no mass appeal or doesn’t influence the way ordinary men and women dress? Do the high priests of Pakistani fashion have anything better to do than design bridal dresses?
Half the fashion shows whose pictures one gets to see in the style pages are about bridal joras. Agreed, marriage is a major preoccupation in our country, treated less as a grim necessity than a major tamasha…such are the lengths to which we go to turn it into a spectacle. So if half the fashion shows in Pakistan are about bridal ‘ensembles’ (isn’t this the right word?) it is understandable.
But fashion gurus take themselves seriously. They lay claim to being artists. As artists shouldn’t they leave the bridal scene a bit and broaden their horizons?
Is there anything more absurd than the calf-length embroidered achkan or sherwani which bridegrooms are supposed to wear? That’s not all…the dashing bridegroom must also wear a version or some apology of a turban. Where did this idea come from?
Pakistani marriages, in any case, are exercises in unrelieved tedium. There’s nothing to do except meet people whom you’d rather not meet, and then the rush to the tables when the belated meal is finally announced. On top of this the embroidered achkan and the turban and you say to yourself…what have I done to deserve this?
The Lucknow achkan, from which the Pakistani wedding achkan derives its origin, is a clownish affair: too long and the buttons too garish. Far more elegant was the Punjabi achkan which Khizar Hayat Tiwana and Amir Muhammad Khan of Kalabagh wore – shorter in length, just an inch or so below the knee, and fitted at the waist. To carry it off, however, you need the proper kind of shalwar with an ample fold, which not every modern tailor knows how to get right.
But if elegance comes from simplicity, where is the mahatma who’ll change some of our societal norms and make them a bit more rational? Marriage, as already stated, we have turned into an extended spectacle. The Islamic funeral is simple…just bury the dead and be done with it. No line of hearses, no one dressed in black, none of the expense and flummery of a Christian burial. But if the burial is simple the mourning goes on and on, for 40 days. Town life now doesn’t allow this luxury. After the third day of mourning the shamianas are carted away. But in villages there is no such mercy. And the bad habit is picking up of having a proper feast on the chaaleeswan – the 40th day of mourning – with invitations going out and meat and rice spread before the guests. A more useless undertaking is hard to imagine.
The Baloch do their fatehas – praying for the dead – much better than us Punjabis. They usually sit on the ground and after every five or ten minutes a designated person raises his hands in prayer and everyone assembled joins him. In Punjab each fresh arrival raises his hands in prayer, which in effect means that the raising and lowering of hands can go on forever. That’s why our bereavements, much like our marriages, are so exhausting. When they are over everyone heaves a sigh of relief.
In Moscow the custom used to be of marriages taking place in a city hall designated for the purpose, couples standing in line and coming up to the registry to the strains of a sombre movement from Tchaikovsky and marching out, hand in hand, to the strains of a brisker Strauss.
After the ceremony which lasted for no more than a few minutes the couple would head to the Moscow Hills next to Moscow University – mostly in a rented Moskovich taxi, the Soviet Union then a blessed place where cars were scarce – and there throw flowers into the distance as a sign of good luck. In the evening there would be a reception for friends and relatives in a restaurant…with much drinking and kissing and dancing. After the weekend everyone would be back at work.
It is a sign of how large a space marriage occupies in our existence – probably because we have nothing better to do – that most TV dramas are about love, marriage and in-laws. So it is hardly surprising if the Pakistani fashion scene is also dominated by the demands of the marriage market.
What other need does the Pakistani fashion industry fulfil? Some of the designer stuff coming out is gorgeous but can you wear these outfits, say, in Empress Market Karachi or the Mall in Lahore? If these jazzed-up outfits are only to be worn in private parties or cloistered functions – literary festivals and seminars in major cities being great occasions for young and beautiful people to look cool and hip and wear stuff they couldn’t wear if they were to step out of those closed spaces – and if the fashion scene in Faisalabad or Sahiwal is to remain untouched by them, then the fashion divide becomes as serious or glaring as the class divide or the language divide.
The western fashion industry is different. It has had a global impact. Go to any major city in the west or in Latin America and men and women not just in swank restaurants and hotels but in the underground or just walking about will be dressed stylishly and elegantly. Of course not everyone will be wearing the most expensive brands. But even mass clothing has been affected for the better by high fashion (or should I be saying haute couture?).
Look at the dowdy dresses worn by ordinary people during the Second World War. As the war ended and wartime austerity gave way to more easy times, there was a change of mood and feeling reflected in a different kind of music – the Beatles, etc – and a more elegant approach to fashion and clothing. The urban scene became more happening and hip. People danced to the new music and they started wearing better-designed clothes. Between mass culture and the high-end fashion industry there was thus a close connection.
Not so in Pakistan where fashion gurus and fashion mistresses talk breathlessly about styles and trends that have no relevance or meaning for most Pakistanis. The models of course are stunning but they do their stuff before a very small audience.
Whatever Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s impact on politics he left an effect on mass taste, popularising and making acceptable amongst the well-heeled the wearing of the shalwar-kameez. Gen Zia declared the shalwar-kameez and the waistcoat as the national dress. Among zamindars and the landed gentry it could be a flamboyant item of clothing. With the middle-level bureaucrat and the upper-division clerk the shalwar-kameez looked more like a night-suit than anything else. One look at Pakistani officialdom in the national dress and you immediately understand why files get lost and no work gets done in the hallowed corridors of the Pakistani bureaucracy.
Are things on the mend? The loose pyjama-trouser and the long shirt which was the fashion amongst women just a few years ago was a sinister conspiracy against Pakistani womanhood. All the rage then, this dress could barely be carried off by the bold and the beautiful. With aunties it could be a real horror and yet it lasted for quite some time. Remember the bell-bottom craze of the 1970s? The loose, long pyjama was as great a disaster.
But relief from this dismal state of affairs has come in the form of the tight, leg-clasping trousers or pyjamas which are in vogue now. This is a stroke of genius and the begetter of it deserves a place with the saints. For the tight trousers not only restore to its rightful place the wonder of Pakistani womanhood, obscured by the catastrophe of the loose pyjama, but serve to shine a fresh light on it. We grew up believing that only the west and Latin America excelled in the matter of legs. We now have a better understanding of the truth.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com