Imagine this summer story: you have an event to attend in your perennially warm city, (we’re looking at you, Karachi) and just can’t with the options before you. Chiffons and georgettes are definitely light and airy, but anyone with experience wearing the fabric on a humid evening will tell you they are not conducive to staying dry and comfortable. Silk and satin are a hard no, because you can barely bear your own skin during hotter-each-year summers (looking at climate change now, that scoundrel).

Enter Zaheer Abbas.

“Everyone at Colombo Fashion Week loved the collection,” he says. “They appreciated the Pakistani craft and the handmade cotton. What I essentially did was turn cotton into couture. This is outright a partywear collection, and one of the reasons it was received so well is that Colombo, like Karachi, experiences warm, humid weather all year round.”

This is Abbas’s second cotton collection, the first set of which released in 2019. Then of course, 2020 sent everyone and their business into house arrest, and it is only two years later that we see a building glimmer of activity in the fashion, entertainment and lifestyle industries.

Abbas believes that with the right treatment and accessorizing, cotton can completely replace other fabrics for events that call for more formal outfits.

“You don’t need to wear luxurious fabrics,” he says. “If you’ve got a piece in cotton that has been treated into couture, all you need is some jewelry and you’re good to go.”

Of course, Pakistanis love their festive formal wear: yards of silk and organza, weighed down by intricate embroideries and kaam and bling. It wouldn’t be a shaadi until all of us are dressed to kill in heavily-embellished joras. And not to dismiss the place and sartorial significance opulently worked clothes hold, but the mere idea of an ensemble that will just sit lightly on the body is refreshing.

Dreaming Again has been described as a return to life, and perhaps to set stalled plans in motion again. Like a lot of other creatives, Abbas too celebrates the slow but optimistic spin back to normalcy, and with that – whether consciously or subconsciously – he nods at the learnings of the last couple of years.

With everything at a standstill for so long, a lot of us have realized, or learned to cut out the superfluous and live, to put it rather tritely, more simply. And one of the most basic emotions we might be feeling collectively at the moment is sheer relief at being able to breathe relatively freely out in the open again. In that circumstance, who really needs to weigh themselves down in fabric and embellishment when we can convey and achieve so much more with a streamlined cut on a breathable fabric?

Abbas understands that Pakistan loves its cotton, but with caveats.

“People do prefer cotton,” he says, “but the mindset we need to change or get over is that cotton is like lawn. It can be so much more.

“Cotton doesn’t have to be just for casual wear. When it is treated to look fabulous, we might be able to highlight the fact that silk isn’t the only fabric appropriate for formal wear.”

While Zaheer Abbas works to turn cotton into couture, and plans on releasing a lookbook for the collection in the near future, he does find that it is slightly tougher to convince his clientele that this isn’t just an oxymoron.

“But my clients are coming around,” he reports, “and I believe more people will opt for cotton when dressing up for formal events.”

– Dreaming Again is
cotton in a neutral palette, imagined into dresses, pants, tops, and skirts, and is available to order at the designer’s studio.