Karachi Fashion Week 2011 is set to feature new talent.
KARACHI: Karachi Fashion Week launched a choreographer and model hunt programme at Park Towers on July 11. The three-day activity is aimed to find new faces for the fashion week starting from October 6. To be held at Marriott Hotel, Karachi, the event will come to a close on October 9, after presenting 24 runway shows with over 20 retail brands and designers participating in it.
CEO Karachi Fashion Council, Tariq Amin is supervising the three-day activity which will conclude with the selection of 15 male and female models, each.During a press conference held at Park Towers, CEO Triple-E Arshad Siddiqui said: “The main aim of the Karachi Fashion Week is to promote trade and boost exports which will eventually make Pakistan strong.”
“The organiser Triple-E has been signed on as the official representative at the World Fashion Organisation. Around 40 countries are party to it. This is indeed a great platform to boost e-commerce services for Pakistani fashion and textile industry,” he added.
Siddiqui announced that at the upcoming Welcome Gala of the World Fashion Organisation, fashion icons from around the world will gather and the international committee has “selected fashion designer Nilofer Shahid and model Rabia Butt as Pakistan’s official representatives.” The event will take place in New York in September this year.
Talking to The Express Tribune, Amin said: “There are many good retail brands that offer pret. Fashion is a global thing and during Karachi Fashion Week 2011, our target is not the fashion designers but our retail market. We plan to dress the world, and not just those five per cent of Pakistan.”
“We need to do a world product. Our models should be able to go to Dubai and should not be limited to Pakistan only and this, I believe, can be done,” added Amin.
About the search for models, Amin said: “This is our talent pool that is coming out of Karachi, the search for models injects new blood in the industry. Better people come out of it.”
Criticising the other councils to be too business-centred, Amin claimed that Karachi Fashion Council is primarily focused on exports. “It’s a numbers game. By selling five Pakistani items, we can’t compete in the world. We need to find people who can dress the nation and the world,” he said.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 13th, 2011.
