Atiya
Khan settles down with a glass of cardamom infused sherbet to make
an uncomfortably hot summer afternoon in Karachi a little bearable.
The air around her wafts of ittar, the alcohol-free perfume that
the deeply spiritual take a preference to. Atiya asks someone to
bring her cigarettes and as she lights up, the scent of the ittar
intermingles with the wisps of smoke that pirouette around her.
Atiya Khan is quite a dichotomy; the industry has followed the path
she took from fashion to Sufism, from fashion modeling to observing
the hijab. But in everything she has done, Atiya hasn't been able
to shake off her inherently fashionable soul. When she began covering
her head, Atiya attended the Lux Style Awards in a stunning white
Rizwan Beyg outfit, adorned with an intimately crocheted dupatta
on her head. When she began hosting Zikr, a religious forum on television,
she delighted the fashion industry with her elegant disposition
and the fact that a beautiful, well-dressed woman could talk religion.
And remnants of that stylish woman have lingered on; evident in
the black nail polish on her fingertips as well as the diamante
studded black Chanel spectacles she wears today. Atiya Khan may
appear a contradiction to many but she has managed to attain a confident
and serene persona that has only added to her timeless beauty.
It has been 23 years since Atiya gave up modeling at the age of
21, though it seems like yesterday, when pioneers like Rizwan Beyg
and Tariq Amin reminisce the bygone era. That was the beginning
of the history of Pakistani fashion and Atiya Khan certainly was
Pakistan's first style icon.
"Atiya is the original supermodel of this country," says
Tariq Amin who has worked with her very closely. "She was the
first model to appear on the cover of Herald. Atiya brought class
to fashion. She is the original 'IT' girl. She remains the most
gorgeous and versatile face I've ever worked on. You just had to
acknowledge her presence. It was about print modeling back then
and Photoshop didn't exist. It was about classic beauty and Atiya
was someone you could identify with. She's real. She's incomparable
to any of these new girls. Atiya is timeless and she's come back
looking even more beautiful."
As beautiful as she was and is, Atiya was never a 'dumb blonde',
never someone who could be happy being a clothes horse forever.
She cut off abruptly when she felt things had begun to get stale.
She suddenly went behind the camera, giving up fashion modeling
when it began to bore her. It was inevitable. And almost twenty
years on, Atiya Khan has come a full circle, stepping back into
the industry with a new agenda. This time she's the designer not
model, the mentor not the protégé.
Atiya is back in Pakistan having spent the last three years in Canada.
And she's back in business. Not only has she launched her own fashion
label - AK - at Labels in Karachi, but in partnership with Zahir
Rahimtoola, she has also set up an image consultancy firm called
Imaging. The idea is to groom and train professionals, no matter
which walk of life they are from. It could be grooming corporate
executives as well as fashion models. Modeling in Pakistan and the
way it has come to be perceived as today is something that disturbs
Atiya immensely. It's almost like a cause she is taking up.
"I feel respectability is going out of fashion," she says
with a focus on modeling. "These (fashion) images put out in
magazines are so powerful but their impact is just as damaging.
Why are models these days looking like extremely bored dolled up
housewives sprawled out on a couch waiting to be penetrated?"
"I feel that certain people are in this industry just to make
money," she continues. "There is no love for creativity,
for fashion. It was different back in the eighties. Fashion wasn't
lucrative and only people with a genuine interest or flair got into
it. Look at it now. Fashion and modeling is a viable profession
these days but because it has lost respect, no one wants to get
into it. Models are exploited, the good ones leave, traumatized.
They need decent people looking after their interests and that's
what we intend to do."
It certainly was different back in the eighties when runway modeling
didn't exist and fashion was limited to print. And what a fabulous
print model Atiya Khan made. Even stern and scowling in some of
the old shoots, she looked better than the girls do today.
"The '80s saw the burgeoning fashion scene in Pakistan,"
remembers Rizwan Beyg, who calls Atiya his muse. "People like
Tariq Amin, Nabila, Sadie, Atiya, Arif Mehmood and myself saw the
birth of fashion. It was the gathering of like minded people. The
whole thing was about ideas. So many of us - Shamaeel, Maheen Khan,
Nilofer Shahid - were starting out. Frieha (Altaf) and Atiya were
in the modeling scene. And since there was no Photoshop back then,
the camera had to love you. And the camera loved Atiya. She was
the Christy Turlington of Pakistan. Atiya epitomized style not fashion.
At a party when everyone came in traditional clothes, she came in
a man's suit. She was amazing. To me she epitomizes the classic
Pakistani beauty. Atiya is ageless."
Leaving the industry right before take-off, Atiya took off herself.
She changed, almost like a chameleon trying to camouflage itself
in its habitat. Atiya's wonderful, self assured serenity translated
to a new obsession with Sufism, an obsession that put a distance
between her and the industry she had worked in.
This shift in Atiya's life started, of course, when she was commissioned
to do a documentary on the annual Urs at Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalander.
She got caught up in the Sufic wave and the rest, as they say is
history. But that commitment came after various professional deviations:
Atiya stepped into advertising then television and produced/directed
Raqeeb, the first film made for television. She made a brief comeback
in front of the camera with a Mobilink ad campaign with film actor
Shaan and then she disappeared. Hers was a restless mind, in forever
pursuit of absolution that she found in Sufism. And then Atiya,
the woman who had given fashion a fabulous face in the eighties,
starting covering her head. She also began hosting Zikr on television
- a program that invited discussion between ulema from various sects
of Islam.
On
a personal level, this is what Atiya has been working on ever since.
She's trying to develop a platform for interfaith dialogue, to engage
with the rest of the world. It's what she had been doing in Canada
at Soul TV (an online service that engaged people from different
faiths in healthy dialogue) and what she intends to do here.
|
