London based Omar Mansoor is perhaps the only designer who has been showing consistently at London Fashion Week for the past few seasons. This season he will be hitting the ramps of international fashion weeks including London and Paris fashion week with a heritage of Pakistani hand woven silk.
StyleFile
Instep Desk
London based Omar Mansoor is perhaps the only designer who has been showing consistently at London Fashion Week for the past few seasons. This season he will be hitting the ramps of international fashion weeks including London and Paris fashion week with a heritage of Pakistani hand woven silk. His upcoming collection is a special tribute to Pakistani veteran designer Maheen Khan and the collection will be an eclectic mix of Venetian funk made with KOYA silks.
The idea of introducing KOYA silk to the European clientele was discussed when Maheen Khan met Omar Mansoor in London few months ago. Omar was impressed with the samples of finest quality heavy weighted pure silk- not available to European fashionistas and only displayed at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. KOYA was introduced at the Mohatta Palace exhibition, A Flower from Every Meadow, several months ago. Maheen Khan also showcased a capsule collection, incorporating KOYA fabric, at the last season of Fashion Pakistan Week. Needless to say, it’s a project that can do with all the exposure it can get. London Fashion Week would be the perfect platform.
KOYA is an initiative that actually inspires to revive, re-introduce and even rehabilitate the dying craft of hand woven fabric. It aims to provide sustainable solutions to a group of artisans, living mostly in Karachi’s Orangi Town, through creative consultation and pattern guidance to breathe new life into this dying craft. In previous conversations with Instep, Maheen Khan had commented that she wanted designers to commission hand-woven fabric so that the craft stayed in circulation and hence, alive.
Omar Mansoor is one of the first designers to use KOYA fabric in his collections, this particular one being an Autumn/Winter 2016 collection to be showcased at London Fashion Week on 20th February and Paris Fashion Week on 5th of March 2016. This collection will be styled by award winning blogger and stylist Edita Lozovoska.
We wish him the very best of luck!
