Italian designer Stella Jean opens with her Milan Fashion Week collection, made in collaboration with Kailashi karigars, while PinkTree and Maheen Khan revisit the past for styles that bring back the good old days.
Something old, something new, something borrowed and something (not so) blue…these words that defined Maheen Khan’s finale rang true throughout the second day of Fashion Pakistan Week Winter/Festive 2019 (FPWF’19) as Zephyrus allowed the slightest of western winds to cool down the catwalk. They did blow in from the west, with Italian designer Stella Jean – in Karachi with her Milan Fashion Week collection – and they blew in from the past with PinkTree Company’s ode to Technicolour and the era of great films. The day closed with Maheen Khan archival collection, reminiscing what one saw as the golden era of fashion, and hoping for its rebirth.
Stella Jean
Laboratorio Delle Nazioni (An Italian - Pakistan Bridge)
Hundreds of yards of fabric embroidered by artisans in the northern valley of Kailash found their way to Italy to create fashion that stopped short of being folkloristic and instead created a merger of cultures that would be wearable anywhere in the world. Multiculturalism is a word Stella Jean builds her ethos around and her work in Pakistan – it took almost two years to create this collection – is a great example of how to build a nation’s style identity. As models walked out to the beats of ‘Lovers Eyes (Mohe Pi Ki Najariya)’, an electronic rendition of Fareed Ayaz, Abu Muhammad and Hamza Akram’s qawaali, it was evident that this collection was all about fusion. You could see it in the combination of vibrant motifs on somber Italian pinstripes, the structures and silhouettes and the leitmotifs of Pakistan’s rich cultural landscape with a shoutout to truck art, classic movies and cricket.
Humayun Alamgir
Style Mara Tou Darna Kya
Boisterous and loud, Humayun Alamgir tapped into his love for the ‘OTT’ with his show that was just as much about the men who walked for him as it was about the suits. Shehzad Sheikh, Asad Siddiqui, Ali Safina and Muneeb Butt were just four of the names that danced their way across the catwalk, while the models came interspersed and relatively somber. It was definitely a fun show that unrolled a decent menswear collection, primarily projecting velvet as the mainstay for men’s suiting in winter. Body hugging silhouettes made fitness and physique mandatory for wearing these trendy styles and it would help to have some swag, he seemed to be shouting out loud.
PinkTree Company
Colour by Technicolour
Colour and a love for timeless tradition is what defines this brand and it’s what Mohsin Sayeed and Hadia have built a very strong signature around. This collection, essentially an ode to great movies and the era of ‘Technicolour’, was just that. Walking out in high contrast, bright and bold colours of ethnic festivity, this was a collection that made one happy. The models had a spring in their walk and the audience swayed to the crazy Urdu versions of Abba songs. It was a way of saying that some things live on forever. This collection certainly did have timeless appeal.
Maheen Khan
Something old, something new, something borrowed and something not so blue
No one in Pakistan understands the structure of a garment as well as Maheen Khan, which is why her brand of fashion is integral to keep the true essence of fashion alive. At a time when wedding wear means more and more and embroideries, embellishments and fussy prints is what sells in the name of fashion, Maheen Khan’s minimalist and clean albeit sassy silhouettes were a delight to watch. Her collection, explained as ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something (not so) blue’ dug into the archives and brought back shapes and sizes that will never go out of style. Her show opened with her muse, Areeba Habib, and then celebrated real women, who – like the collection – will never go out of style.
– Photography by Faisal Farooqui @ Dragonfly
