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...

Pakistanis, in general, have little tolerance for satire about themselves. That is why political humour programmes on television usually have to preface their episodes with a disclaimer, labeling them clearly as satire and not to be taken seriously. But of all Pakistanis perhaps none are as dour, humourless and self-righteous as members of the fashion 'fraternity' (let's just say this fraternity is no  Animal House ). For all their claims of 'playfulness' and 'fun' in their designs, they are one acidic and sour lot when at the receiving end of even good-natured ribbing. Witness the indignant response to  Express Tribune 's rather funny  April 1st joke on its Lifestyle pages .  ET 's  April Fool prank  'broke' the news that the Lahore-based  Pakistan Fashion Design Council (PFDC)  and the Karachi-based  Fashion Pakistan (FP)  - often roundly criticized for making their own  daerrh eenth ki masjidein  - were to merge, and carried...

I would have written this in February but I’ve been stuck in traffic outside a lawn exhibition since. If you live in the open in Karachi, and not under a rock, you cannot have missed the wave of lawn related advertising that has been crashing upon our shores for the last few weeks, leaving sensory carnage in its wake. 2011 has seen a record number of brands flood the market. Some 30-odd designers have lent their names to collections, and if you count the textile mills without big name designers attached and the imitation lawn print makers the number reportedly edges well over fifty. They call me Jofa, say it like Sofa, you look tired hon, lean on my Ottoman. Women are unislamic. Look instead at my jeweled balls floating heavenwards. Because April 1st was already taken, fool! I love the way those bubbles of lightness float across pastel space almost as randomly as the way I park. I must buy this aqua ensemble because it looks ridiculously expensive and so did my husband. Nishat Textile...

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...