The sharif girls who live in the Zara Shahjahan ad campaigns

I've wanted to write about Zara Shahjahan for ages but was never quite sure of what I wanted to say. Unlike Khaadi and Sapphire (prints on prints on prints, new lines every two weeks) or Generation (casual, quirky, sometimes questionable styling), Zara Shahjahan can say that it offers something else. The clothes are expensive, the colours are muted - rusts, khakis, chocolate browns, navy blues - the embroidery nobody can fault and, perhaps most important of all, the brand seems to depend entirely on nostalgia in order to sell any clothes. For reference, please look at their latest campaign in which the models dressed in kurta shalwar in various colours are holding silver tiffins, standing next to sewing machines, leaning against wooden cabinets and sitting on sinduks. All of this inspired some outrage on Twitter, concerning the fetishising of every day items in middle class households in order to sell clothes no middle class person can afford, and while I think this is an important thing to say, I do also want to think about the fashioning of ideal womanhood within these campaigns built around this pervasive nostalgia. 

My main question is who exactly are the sharif girls that live in the world the Zara Shahjahan fashion house has created? Who are the girls who wear matching ruby red separates as they caress the tiffin boxes they lovingly prepare for their husbands to take to work? Who are the girls who gossip with each other, gauzy dupattas hanging over their shoulders, with a sewing machine settled in between them? The whole messaging is so ridiculously wholesome; girls fully covered from head to toe with dupattas to boot, confined to indoor spaces with various domestic artefacts and only other sharif girls (cousins, sisters, neighbours) for company. Who are these girls in the Zara Shahjahan clothes and what do they signify? By asking who they are I'm not demanding that they step forward and raise their hands. Obviously they don't exist and we are all more than aware of this. Instead, by asking who they are I want to get to the heart of what ZS is trying to do in a bid to sell clothes. 

Zara Shahjahan has (sort of) answered this question in the 'about us' section of their website. Honestly my favourite part of going to any designer's website is visiting the about us section because the messaging is just laid bare and if there are no actual concepts (often the case) then you just get gibberish with some buzzwords thrown in and that is the moment where it truly dawns on you that the multimillion dollar fashioning of ideal womanhood in this country is based on utterly meaningless bs. I don't even know why I write these newsletters and make these videos, I should just post the about us sections of fashion websites onto my IG and call it a day. But, for what it's worth, here is what ZS has to say:

  The Zara Shahjahan woman is not any ordinary woman: she is free from the shackles of the fickle world with a timeless approach to fashion, she is confident of her past and grounded enough in her roots to embrace tradition in its purest form and therefore, she profoundly inspires people around her. This is what we aim to achieve: giving our clients the power to inspire.

If the modern world is a fickle world then the sharif girls of the Zara Shahjahan ad campaigns can counter this by virtue of their purity, exemplified by sewing machines, embroidered shalwars, muted colours, and tea sets. This is how ZS in particular negotiates the tradition/modern binary, by suggesting that a certain 'rootedness' will keep you afloat in these fast paced times. And so, you can be as 'modern' as you want, but please remember to wear these notions of timelessness, purity and rootedness quite literally on your sleeve. Never mind that the models in the clothes all fit the narrow ideal of beauty recognised as such in this 'fickle' world. Also on the ZS Instagram there is also a video of girls , clad in Zara Shahjahan angarkhas, dancing on a rooftop in Lahore to Amrita Pritam's Mein Tenu Pher Milangi, the video and song are both dedicated to the artists forgotten by the city who "suffered so artists like us could breathe" I wasn't aware that artists in Pakistan are anymore free today than they were a few decades ago. The fact that this is collaboration between a brand and an artist should tell you everything you need to know about the state of affairs with regards to art in Pakistan. Not to be a cynic, it is a very pretty video and nobody can deny that, but it also just is what it is. An ode to some nostalgia drenched past that never existed, a rejection of the fickle, modern world that has created that same past. The paradox upon which it seems the modern fashion industry has situated itself, and women's bodies, upon. 

A note on freedom is necessary here. According to Zara Shahjahan what will save us from the modern world is timelessness. A timeless approach to fashion, the brand suggests, is one that comes from tradition (purity) and therefore is not subject to the ever changing world we live in today. But what is interesting is that  timelessness is a category that clearly positions itself as apolitical. What are other clothes that we refer to as timeless? A crisp white shirt, a pair of classic jeans, a gharara that used to belong to someone else, an heirloom dupatta; none of these things are apolitical. By virtue of the fact that they were made at a certain time, in a certain place, that they are used today to denote a certain time and a certain place, this is what makes them deeply political. This is why the clothes we wear can never truly 'liberate' us. We should be wary of this category of timelessness when it comes to fashion, we should perhaps regard it with more scrutiny than fashion which claims to be of-this-time. 

All fashion promises us freedom from ourselves and delivers something that is far less than the fact. But this assertion of timelessness as freedom is particularly grating to me, this idea that the 'past' will  redeem us. I think about the women that Zara Shahjahan seems so inspired by, the respectable middle class Muslim woman who represents the sanctity and honour of the nation, the measure and progress of the nation. I think about my grandmother, her sisters, my aunts, my mother, myself. I think about what it takes to mould women into this respectability. 

And this is why the Zara Shahjahan ad campaigns make me so angry, the audacity of a brand to promise us redemption by selling us what has in part contributed to our exploitation is something that should make us all angry. 

And as for the sharif girls in the Zara Shahjahan ad campaigns, how are we to think of them? I wonder what they are talking about when they sit prettily next to each other, one on a sinduk and the other on a wooden cabinet, in colours that are never too bold or flashy. And then, I wonder why I wonder about this at all. Surely they too are talking about the thing the rest of us have always talked about, the thing we chase single-mindedly every single day. Surely they too are calculating how to taste a drop of freedom in this fickle world of ours.