No matter how much one vows not to indulge in the lawn madness, it’s difficult not to get sucked into its colourful, irresistable cycle every year. Long queues outside retail stores, rowdy crowds and more recently, the added stress of pre-booking prints marks the onset of spring in Pakistan. Designers are also tapping into this growing demand for lawn and hence, every passing year witnesses more and more designers delving into the business.
Zara Shahjahan’s lawn got out of stores just as quickly as it came in, and is said to have been sold out on the label’s e-store in less than half an hour. And that left a bitter taste in the mouth for thousands of customers, waiting eagerly.
LawnMania
Obsession over her lawn collection turns into a witchhunt when fanfare gets ugly.
No matter how much one vows not to indulge in the lawn madness, it’s difficult not to get sucked into its colourful, irresistable cycle every year. Long queues outside retail stores, rowdy crowds and more recently, the added stress of pre-booking prints marks the onset of spring in Pakistan. Designers are also tapping into this growing demand for lawn and hence, every passing year witnesses more and more designers delving into the business. This year alone, about 245 lawns are set to hit the market and a chunk of them have already launched to a full house.
One may argue that it’s a necessity that has been pushed too far but then the added designer value, embellishments, shimmer, glimmer and the shebang make lawn worth the price and effort. And the fact that it is ideal for our climate. One may also argue over the hysteria that designer lawn has come to create but then this craze is not unique to just lawn and Pakistan. Internationally, fashion collaborations such as that of H&M and Balmain are testament to the kind of hype affordable designer wear tends to generate. Designer lawn, in Pakistan, is the equivalent of a designer-high-street collaboration. The problem, however, arises when all of it becomes too uncivil to handle and when this craze turns to obsession and eventually to aggression.
Lahore-based designer Zara Shahjahan is currently suffering the consequences of this aggression. Her Noor Bano collection featuring Syra Shehroz as the brand ambassador, is undoubtedly one of her best, be it in terms of design, colour palette, marketing campaign or styling. Vibrant tribal prints with heavily embroidered add-ons shot against the back drop of the serene Cholistan dessert, the Zara Shahjahan catalogue is fresh, innovative and attractive. In fact, the collection’s teaser image got over 64,000 likes in less than a week. But what should have been a celebration of overwhelming success turned into an unwelcome disaster.
The pre-booking for Zara Shahjahan’s lawn, which was meant to commence on March 12 and then later on March 14, was eventually cancelled by the team on the label’s e-store. A note on the label’s official Facebook page stated, “Due to the unethical practices of some retailers in the market, who revealed the designs without our approval and prior to our announced dates, we had to start pre-booking for Zara Shahjahan Lawn’16 on 12th March, 2016. Due to an overwhelming response, pre-bookings are now closed. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience you may have encountered in this regard!” This, of course, left many dissatisfied.
Instep spoke to the designer to find out what exactly happened.
“I don’t know how but one of our biggest retailers stole our catalogue’s PDF files from the printer and started pre-booking designs on the night before March 12 around 10pm,” Shahjahan revealed. “They placed ads announcing that pre-booking has begun and so hundreds of women started crowding outside their store. By early morning, they closed the pre-booking and the remaining lot of women then turned towards our retail outlet in Lahore complaining hysterically over why we are not pre-booking outfits when others are. Naturally then, our salesmen got too stressed out in the kind of aggressive situation it turned into and started taking orders. By next day we were fully booked and so obviously we had to cancel pre-bookings for the 14th. We couldn’t take orders on stock that we didn’t have. The best option was to first complete our dealers’ orders and the pre-bookings and then put up the remaining stock online and in our stores on the 16th.”
This decision was not taken well by lawn fanatics, who went literally ballistic. There were people abusing the designer and the team on social media, accusing them of poor customer service and initiating boycott campaigns through Facebook pages. The frustration was such that many were even spotted egging the designer’s house.
“In these past two days, the amount of abuse I’ve been subjected to is very upsetting. They have verbally abused me, physically threatened me, made Facebook pages and in fact turned it into an ‘elite vs. masses’ debate, suggesting that I make lawn only for the elite,” Shahjahan shared. “I’ve produced 18,000 pieces and that’s not an amount that targets just the elite class. People who pre-booked got their outfits and even those who logged onto our websites on Wednesday morning, post-midnight. We opened our website to orders around 12:15am and were completely sold out on some of our popular designs by 12:30am. And that led to even more abuse. Women blamed us of wasting their time and raising their hopes. A lot of people around me said that I should be happy about how big a demand there is for my lawn but no one seems to understand how bad one feels when so many people start abusing you for something which is not really your fault.”
A point to note here is that no matter what the demand is, designer items are always produced in limited editions and not in mass volumes and hence, it is natural for them to sell out quickly. This is no novel business model but indeed one that is followed world over. Going back to the example mentioned above, the H&M/Balmain collection sold out in less than 50 minutes in most of the H&M stores across the globe! And it makes complete business sense for a designer to make a limited amount of collection because lesser investment reduces the amount of risk. From a successful 15,000 pieces last year, Shahjahan produced 18,000 this year, independently and not with a mill, gauging the likely demand of her creations. And it seems to have worked well for her business.
Similarly, however, a frenzied, chaotic environment for designer wear and website crashes are also not something out of the ordinary. But then that does not warrant defamation and abuse.
Such incidents have only become frequent in the recent past. Just recently, women were seen breaking the doors of Agha Noor’s Dolmen Mall outlet on the first day of sale. Earlier, women were caught on camera pulling each other’s hair out over a Sapphire outfit. Is it justifiable and sane to obsess over an outfit so much and then later blame the designer for a bad attitude simply because one could not get their hands on it? Discussions over social media forums about designers creating unnecessary hype and then not being able to meet demands (which may very well be the case) are understandable to some extent, but, at the same time, some of these women shoppers also need to start reflecting on their behaviour and analyze whether it’s fair of them to act in this manner. If it’s so frustrating and really a worthless experience, then might as well start by not giving into temptation, in the first place, and lose sanity.
