L’affaire: A love affair with clothes gone wrong

The debut collection of pret wear store fails to excite fashion conscious clientele.

LAHORE:

While a buzzing retail scene may come off as a blessing for many a hapless woman who wishes to be fashion savvy, and a hot ticket for entrepreneurs looking to make a quick buck doing the ‘it’ thing, it’s not as simple and easy as it appears to be.

You cannot expect to hang a few different designs on the rack and, voila, expect whooshing sales. But that’s where retail, despite its boom, will become a bubble that will burst viciously - a fact that a store like L’affaire, that just opened its door’s off MM Alam road, serves as a testimony to.

Following the Generation and Origins paradigm, L’affaire offers a vast collection of ready made attire that, although priced within a high ceiling of Rs5,000, doesn’t come close to the quality of design and fabric that both stores offer. As one fashion designer commented aptly: “This store was better fit at Liberty Market or at Fortress Stadium.”

With increasing competition in the pret market, stores offering ready-to-wear need to up the ante with design, craftsmanship and fabric to stand out-something L’affaire is strongly lacking. Although the designs were introspective, taking inspiration from local crafts like mirror work, the way the ensembles were put together was quite passe. With designs that appeared a bit amateurish and incongruent, it would serve the store better if it wasn’t competing in a high-end market space like MM Alam Road that houses stores like Labels, Fashion Pakistan Lounge, Portfolio and Tehxeeb- multi retail designer stores that carry garments with impeccable finishing and cater to a style conscious clientele.

While usually it’s a good idea to have models don a store’s clothes to gauge the general cut, silhouette and fit of the garment, if the models end up looking like rag dolls then there is cause for concern about what a store is offering.

Despite the general sense that something was seriously off about L’affaire’s debut collection, Ali Raza of Portfolio took an optimistic view: “It’s great that despite the potential threat of war looming over our heads, new stores are opening up every week, undeterred by it all. The more competition in any industry the more growth it will generate, and people will now consider alterative markets like Sialkot, Faisalabad and Gujranwala as the pret concept is becoming so pervasive.”

Yet a word of caution that Raza offers, one that L’affaire should heed very seriously, is: “Now the situation is such, that only those who are professionals at what they do will survive.”

A major rethinking is required on the part of the store and its design team on how to create value for its customers.



Published in The Express Tribune, May 10^th, 2011.