Moborate

Recently, the comedian and writer Sami Shah tweeted the following image, accompanying the visuals with the line 'My gift to anyone who tries telling you that fashion in Pakistan should be taken seriously' : I know this snub has probably enraged all the fashionistas out there, especially those who never tire of telling us how fashionpromotesourculture , how fashioninvolvesbloodsweatandtears , how fashioncanincreaseourexports and how fashionisfightingtheTaliban . But I would submit there's another reason why fashion is not taken seriously by anyone outside the fashionistas' charmed circle or at least certainly not as seriously as they hope it is taken: fashion journalism. I personally have nothing against fashion designers per se. Some of them can be quite creative at what they do, everyone's got to make a living somehow and most people wear clothes and like nice clothes, even when they can't afford them. It's the fact that commodotized fashion seems to h...

Oh wow. We've all become so used to the hyperbole of the Western and local language English press around Pakistan Fashion Weeks , that it is sometimes easy to forget how a significant section of society in Pakistan views them. And who better to represent that view than our intrepid Khalifa-ul-Waqt , Ansar Abbasi, who can and will hold forth on anything. The guardian of Pakistan's values: Ansar Abbasi Below is a translation of his Urdu op-ed piece published in today's Jang (thanks to @tazeen for drawing my attention to it). It is worth a read, not only because it provides a window to the mindset of Abbasi and possibly many, many others. But also because it draws attention, once again, to the linguistic divide that separates the English reading public and non-English reading public, a divide that is not only tolerated but pandered to. (It is extremely unlikely you would ever read anything like this article in the Jang group's English paper The News or any other Englis...