 Right now, couch potatoes all over Pakistan could give you a running commentary on Nadia Hussain. The model cum actress has recently joined the lawn rat race and she’s taking her new avatar very seriously. She’s had her face plastered on billboards all over the city for quite a few weeks and throughout the duration of her lawn exhibition, she made sure that she was invited to umpteen talk shows, morning shows, cooking shows, et al. And thus, at the moment, any couch potato worth his or her mettle could happily ace a pop quiz on Nadia Hussain.
A cooking show she appeared in, for instance, glorified her role as a mother who balanced her work with her children’s schedule. The talk shows, less interested in the domestic details, focused more on her experiences as a model. And all these interviews, naturally, involved appropriate questions regarding Nadia’s debut “Signature” lawn series. Sitting pretty in one lawn outfit after another, Nadia smilingly answered the often repetitive questions, waxed lyrical about her lawn and generously gave away free suits and discount vouchers to enthusiastic callers. Tedious work but it probably did the trick by drawing in more women to the lawn exhibition, curious to know what the brouhaha was all about.
I meet up with Nadia while she is cavorting back and forth between television interviews and visiting her lawn exhibition hall. Strangely enough, the first thing I notice is not her elegant lawn shirt but how different she looks from her TV, ramp and red carpet appearances. Here, in her home, while her children happily play Tae Kwon Do in the garden, she’s wearing glasses and her hair is tied in an easy braid. She’s still wearing make-up but it’s a lot less than in her public appearances. It makes her look much prettier and a lot less artificial, a problem that I feel Nadia often faces due to her predilection for multiple layers of foundation.
But make-up choices not withstanding, Nadia Hussain is beautiful and certainly very hardworking. She’s been modeling for 12 years and continues to be a regular on the ramp and in the glossies. At 5’10”, she’s taller than many of the new models, and also slimmer, despite having given birth to two children. And like many other models, she’s also delved into acting. While her performances may not be the stuff of legends, Nadia has now appeared in enough TV plays to be a familiar face all over Pakistan. And now, flying high on her popularity with the masses as well as with the more fashion-conscious elite, she has decided to venture into entrepreneurial waters. Last year, she launched her shoe line, Fetish. This year, she’s come up with her signature lawn series and she’s certainly pulled out all stops in promoting it.
Model turns lawn mogul
A layman, hearing Nadia praising the signature lawn to the skies, would probably assume that this was entirely Nadia’s own, personal venture. In truth, the lawn’s costs are being shouldered completely by retail brand, Flitz. This is the same company that, incidentally, introduced Nadia’s shoe-line, Fetish, last year.
Assuming that she is mainly providing the glamour necessary to draw in the crowds, I ask her why she hasn’t just touted herself as a brand ambassador for the lawn? “But I am much more than a brand ambassador to the lawn series!” she immediately corrects me. “As in the case of my shoe line, I have been completely involved in the designing process. Yes, we had a design team on board but I worked with them right from the color selection to the final approval of designs. A brand ambassador just wears the lawn outfits, poses in them for the catalogues and is available for the requisite TV interviews. Iman Ali, for instance, as brand ambassador for Asim Jofa’s lawn, came on TV for the promotion but when I heard her speak I could tell that all she knew about the lawn was that it was pretty.
For me, my signature lawn has been a personal project.”
While this may be true, I ask Nadia if she feels that she has the expertise to suddenly set out into the designing field. Iman Ali, at the Jofa lawn launch, put across a valid point when she declared that as a model she preferred to make the product she endorsed look good. She wasn’t a designer and she’d rather leave the lawn designing to the experts. “That is one point of view,” Nadia diplomatically surmises. “Of course, I am not claiming that I designed the lawn all on my own. I had a trained team of designers available to guide me. But having been part of the fashion fraternity for such a long time, I think I have developed a knack for knowing what will sell and what won’t.”
And why shouldn’t she? Kate Moss designed for Topshop for four years and though she wasn’t a trained designer, her collections were a raving success. And if Topshop is UK’s answer to wearable high fashion, lawn is capable of instigating mass hysteria in Pakistan. Nadia, with the fashion know-how she has amassed over the years, may just be able to learn the ropes and turn into a lawn designer, over time.
Vying with Vinnie
Nadia’s assertions are reminiscent of Vaneeza Ahmed, when she brought out her V9 lawn all those years ago. Like Nadia, Vinnie was familiar to the masses as a model and actress. When she joined hands with Mohammed Farooq textiles to bring out V9 lawn, the ladies came in throngs. Even the way Vinnie promoted her lawn was very similar to Nadia’s present efforts. She put her face on the billboards and made personal appearances at the exhibition hall. The press and media were invited to the lawn’s formal launch, which included a fashion show where models paraded in lawn outfits designed by Sonya Batla, HSY, Nomi Ansari, Deepak Perwani and Umar Sayeed. Nadia has, on the other hand, had the lawn outfits on the billboards and catalogues designed by reputed designers like Zainab Sajid, Maheen Karim, Zaheer Abbas and Mehdi, among others. The subtext is clearly there: this may not be a lawn created by a known designer but look how good it looks in these designer creations!
 Continuing on with the Vinnie comparison, Vinnie also had a bona fide design team that did the actual lawn designing. Now, though, with her personal venture, Vaneeza Lawn, she has been in the business long enough and professes to be familiar enough with the work to do all the lawn designing on her own.
Unlike Vinnie, though, Nadia has 26 lawn brands to contend with and while she may be working hard at all the necessary promotion and may be glamorous enough to attract the ladies, that still can’t be a guarantee that her lawn will be a success. “There is just so much competition,” she complains. “Honestly, I don’t think customers have the buying power that will be able to sustain all these brands in the market. I was taken aback when I actually realized the number of people who were planning to bring out their own lawns this year. Up till December last year, I hadn’t revealed my plans for launching a lawn of my own to anyone. As it turned out, there were quite a few other people who were following similar tactics. It was when I began asking designers to fashion outfits out of the lawn suits that I realized that Nomi, Deepak, HSY and Umar Sayeed just weren’t available. They had their hands full with their own lawn collections! I am sure their prints will be beautiful but with so many brands in the market, there are bound to be some lawns that won’t be able to make it to next year.”
In her own case, as she tries to weave her way through the lawn bottleneck, Nadia claims that she isn’t focusing on profits right now. As a fledgling lawn, she realistically doesn’t believe that her collection can compete with doyens like Gul Ahmed, Al-Karam, Junaid Jamshed and Sana Safinaz. Besides, with the huge amount of money Flitz has invested in advertising, they’d need a whole lot of customers in order to make up for their costs. “We’re concentrating on building an image for our brand right now,” Nadia explains. “We’ll think about profits once the masses are familiar with us.”
Still ‘catwalk’ing
Last year, Nadia’s face was in every lawn brochure you could lay your hands on. She’s still in lawn adverts this year but now, they are her own. “Yes, I have lost out on the lawn modeling money,” she laughs. “But I’d much rather do this. I’ve found the whole process of bringing out my own lawn very exciting.”
Having been part of the modeling scene for such a long time, I ask her if the lawn and shoe ventures are her way of slowly inching her way out of the catwalk. “Not really,” she asserts. “This is just another thing I want to do. I am also acting but that doesn’t mean that I have quit modeling. With the frequent fashion weeks we are now having in Pakistan, I feel that I am getting much more work as a model now. The fashion weeks are sponsored by established companies that always pay us on time. In the olden days when fashion shows were more private, small ventures, we’d often have to wait for ages before our pay checks arrived.”
Despite the better pay, though, Nadia notes that the modeling industry has steadily slipped into an ethical decline. Many of the models now have an underlying agenda and while they may be supposedly selling clothes at a fashion show, they usually have clients at the ready to whisk them off once the work is over. Yes, what they do off the catwalk is their own personal business but it does spoil the entire effect of the show. When Nadia first started out, she worked with women like Iraj, Tanya Shafi and Vinnie, who modeled for the fun of their work. But the lascivious side careers of many of the recent models has made modeling a dirty business. “Yes, I have observed all this going on,” Nadia says. “But there are other models that steer clear of such things also.” Ever the diplomat, she continues, “This is something that exists in showbiz and media and not just in Pakistan, but the world over! Aren’t there a lot of Pakistani actresses who are more famous for what they do behind the scenes rather than for their acting prowess? Why point fingers at modeling alone?”
“Some models may be involved in immoral side-careers but rather than focus on what’s happening behind the scenes, look at what’s happening openly on the catwalk,” she points out. “I think more skin is being shown in Pakistani fashion shows right now than ever before. A lot of designers are delving into Western wear and they want the models to wear extremely revealing clothes. At the recent Islamabad Fashion Week, I was taken aback by the skin being shown by the new female models that Tariq Amin had introduced. Perhaps the girls were new and thought that wearing such clothes was just a customary part of modeling.”
Then again, many of the older models don’t have a problem with revealing either. “Yes, of course,” she agrees. “For instance, Fayezah Ansari wore the shortest dress I have ever seen on the Pakistani ramp for Rizwanullah at a recent charity show. I think she did have a tiff with Rizwan about it backstage but eventually, she came out on the ramp anyway. But usually, most of us do complain if we are asked to reveal too much. I once wore an Ammar Belal dress that kept riding up my thighs and it made me so uncomfortable, I kept trying to pull it down while I was on the ramp.”
Her inhibitions, though, have never prevented her from getting work. Nadia’s a regular in the fashion weeks and advertisements. She’s also been invited to participate in Indian fashion shows, something that eventually didn’t work because of visa problems. “I’d love to work abroad but at the end of the day, I have to make sure that my work schedule doesn’t interfere with my home life. I like to be around when my children are home, to feed them and put them to bed myself. Working internationally for weeks would just be too tedious.”
Besides, Nadia really doesn’t feel the need to tread into international waters. She’s got plenty to do right here. On the day I meet her, she has appeared in a TV interview in the morning, picked up her children and donated blood for charity at their school and plans to visit her lawn exhibition in the evening. As soon as her exhibition ends, she begins shooting for a new TV play. A one-woman torpedo, Nadia has a lot going on for her. And who knows what she will do next? She’s intelligent enough to know what works for her and hardworking enough to try her best to make her ventures work well. Life isn’t always smooth … and the road to selling lawn is a rough, bumpy one anyway ….but cleverly, diligently, Nadia Husain will surely steer things to make them go her way |
