It's the end of April, a time when designers all over the world are wrapping up post fashion week business and are figuring out the logistics of meeting deadlines and fulfilling orders for fall/winter 2008. They are busy working on fashion forecasts and trends for the next season already. In Pakistan, it's a time when fashion swings into a totally opposite direction. Instead of seasonal collections and trends in ready to wear clothing, it is lawn that makes it to the limelight. Instead of prêt a porter, it is lawn that establishes a link between fashion and the masses and consequently, everyone begins obsessing about it. This year, the obsession has been unprecedented and has gone into such an overdrive that everyone under the sun wants to jump onto the lawn bandwagon and make hay while the sun shines. The hay, of course, being the huge profits that come with operating on mass scale and in Pakistan nothing gets more massive than lawn sales.

But as with fashion, fabric has also become a bandwagon that is attracting everyone to step up onto it. Once upon a time it was a bored housewife who would get a tailor and a karighar into her garage and insist on being called a 'fashion designer'. Now that bored housewife has given up on fashion and sees greater profits in simply being a 'lawn designer'. It's a definite way of becoming successful overnight, even if only in print! Quite simply, it's a better and definitely more profitable business venture. But it's not just the bored housewife. This lawn pie has suddenly gotten so rich that everyone wants a slice of it. Be it supermodel Vaneeza Ahmad, photographers Guddoo and Shani or socialites Mahin and Erum, anyone with resources and contacts is getting into the lawn business. The most amazing thing is that every yard sells because the market is huge enough to accommodate everyone.

But the fact that models, photographers and socialites are designing lawn does not make them fashion designers. They are textile designers at best, that too if they have absolute creative control of the prints that go under their label.

Sara Shahid is currently designing prints on chiffon and lightweight silks, but she is another designer who deserves applause for her treatment of fabric. This year she took out a limited edition of prints but then she lent them her signature and put them together as separates, sold at her store. She believes that the prints and the way they have been designed reflect her style ethos and are an extension of her aesthetic. That is what one can readily call fashion.

Designers are pushing the boundaries of fashion designing and they are also dictating the creativity of prints. As Rizwan Beyg says, it wouldn't be challenging at all if everyone was sketching prints that were going into linear printing. For him lawn printing has become a creative challenge in which he, as a designer, wants to play around with the neckline and the hemline via the print. He says that mills are seriously investing time and money into the vision designers are bringing to the textile industry and that is pushing forward the most "viable prêt" available in Pakistan.