Biggest fashion sector to get a week to itself

Bridal Couture Week to feature florists, jewellers and travel agents.

LAHORE: Whatever a young girl’s station in life, she is socialised into the dream of looking like a princess on that special day. However, fashion has always looked down upon bridal wear as the ‘lesser cousin’ of haute couture.

Bridal wear designers are often relegated as ‘kaam walas’ with no substantive design aesthetic. Those who exhibit their bridal wear at fashion weeks are censured for doing so.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, and thus it was about time that someone thought of giving the bridal industry its due importance as a business... and so a Bridal Couture Week is born!

In collaboration with Style 360, ace event managers JnS3 conceptualised Pakistan’s first ever biannual fashion exhibit dedicated solely to bridal wear and the associated bridal industry. “This team is a winning combination,” spoke an elated Jalal Salahuddin of JnS events. The last event of similar proportions was the Carnival de Couture and the team is back into action to hold the Bridal Couture Week from November 26 to November 28 in Lahore.

There will be two parts to the Bridal Couture Week: three days of fashion shows in 30 minutes time slots that will start from the afternoon and commence till the evening and an exhibition space that will have stalls from all the veins of the industry, from florists to jewellers and furniture makers to travel agents offering honeymoon packages. The former will be an invite-only event, while the exhibition will be free for all.

“This is a business that creates more business,” said Jalal. Hasan Sheheryar Yasin also affirmed that “the biggest business in fashion is bridal wear. It is the only one that doesn’t suffer a hit from the general economic state since weddings are such a critical feature of our lives. Weddings are not only a big part of our culture, but also our biggest entertainment.”

Model turned producer, Vaneeza Ahmed, is the spokesperson for the project. Speaking on the occasion she said, “Although the fashion industry has grown a lot, there was no consolidated place for the bridal industry to come together like Bridal Asia in India – where everyone associated with the business comes together to exhibit their work and, most importantly, offer choice and convenience for the consumer.”

The Bridal Couture Week will see not only the big guns of the industry like Nilofer Shahid, HSY and Sana Safinaz take to stage, but also give a chance to the lesser known names in the market alongwith designers from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Dubai. “This is an exciting platform for new talent and a great learning process for designers to gauge the tastes and spending patterns of different groups of people,” elaborated HSY.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 7^th, 2010.