Bubbles, frocks, and real life

Whilst not exactly a dedicated follower of fashion, fashion is something I keep a watchful eye on as it is one of the socio-cultural barometres that can say much about my adopted home. It was a chance conversation with a friend and a colleague who writes on the fashion and lifestyle side of the business that got me thinking. They commented on the increasing gap there was between fashion on the catwalks and in the salons of couture — and the real world; and mused that perhaps this was not such a good thing.

They have a point. There is always going to be the outer reaches of absurdity in the fashion universe, the likes of the recently rehabilitated John Galliano putting unwearable grotesqueries down the runway, but much stuff that gets strutted ends up in more practical form in chain stores around the world. Fashion as expressed by the designers makes its way into the ordinary life of most of us. It may not be what we wear but we are aware of the ebb and flow of design, cut and fabric through the media.

There is a perceptible linkage between the rarefied stratosphere of the rag trade and the ordinary man, woman and child living and working — and relaxing — at altogether lower levels. There is a weekly parade of wearables in both the English and Urdu press. Page after page of vacuous Pinkies and Beeni’s with mile-wide smiles are on parade draped in cutting edge frocks that may, just slightly but not very often, push the boundaries. A sleeveless here, the flash of an ankle there, the tiniest hint of cleavage and if the events being snapped are anything at all to do with one of the competing fashion weeks or a bath-soap promotion — well there are quite definitely risks being taken.

Except that there aren’t. We all live in our personal bubbles, the social milieu by which we describe and proscribe our lives. Those bubbles overlap with others, a cultural Venn diagram. Somewhere among the bubbles, however small, there is going to be one marked ‘fashion’. My guess is that the size of the bubble will vary with age and gender, with the largest to be found in women under 30 and the smallest in men over the same age — but it will be there somewhere in most places around the world with developed cultures.

But can the same be said of Pakistan? And here is the point that was being made to me. The connect between the extravagances of haute-couture and the real world is increasingly thin. The fashion plates of Punjab are not as palatable as they were. The annual lawn frenzy where globular begums handbag it out in sweaty scrums has an end result that looks… well… much the same as it did last year, dahling.

The world of the designer label is proving to be less of a leader in normative trends in clothing than is seen elsewhere. As the stitchers and pleaters mince around their atelier and slip in a liberal gusset here, hoist a hemline there, in the bubbles outside there is a strengthening of resistance rather than a willingness to embrace the new, no matter how prestigious the designer. The disconnect is between a bubble that always had the potential to be a challenge to the mainstream, and the bubbles that are living in a world that is increasingly conservative.

Fashion is an industry, albeit small and far smaller in reality than might be imagined from the coverage it gets in the media. It is a world of warring egos, intense competition and tight fiscal margins. Few who make frocks get rich by doing so. Our designer labels are starting to populate niches in markets abroad, and picking up some positive reviews along the way. An expanding middle class has an appetite for it, and the cash to pay the often exorbitant prices being commanded — but only for those products that ‘fit’, and nothing that might be perceived as a push against the boundaries of the suburban drawing room. The bubble the fashionistas live in carries an illusion that it is expanding. Time for a reality check, methinks.

Published in The Express Tribune, March  5^th,  2015.

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