00:00When I try to do my work, irrespective of being in the fashion industry and high-end,
00:04I try to be as democratic as possible.
00:09I have a lot of Arabic influence in my clothes. I think I have had it from day one. In fact,
00:15you know, when my first collection came out, a lot of the influence, if you read online,
00:21was about deserts and gypsies and traveling nomads. A lot of the Middle East, Turkey,
00:27a lot of Europe, a lot of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma,
00:33has been a part of my lifelong inspiration. I started jewelry three years ago, but even
00:39privately I was selling jewelry to a lot of your Arab royal customers for a very long time.
00:45So I think I understand the market. And yeah, while the jewelry addresses
00:50the Southeast Asian demographics and weddings here, but there's a lot of already established
00:56Middle Eastern customers for whom the jewelry is also being brought and curated for them.
01:00When I try to do my work, irrespective of being in the fashion industry and high-end,
01:05I try to be as democratic as possible. If I cannot be democratic in terms of prices,
01:09I like to be democratic visually in terms of accessibility. I always speak of cliches and
01:15languages that people can easily understand. And so for me, body positivity has nothing to
01:20do with the fact that it's a fad right now, or it's something that people are talking about,
01:25or something that is going to become a bigger global acceptance at some point of time.
01:29But I think that when I look at my consumers, my consumers come in all shapes and sizes,
01:34and it's very important for me to have a representation of models that talk about
01:38them. They are the people who build my business, and I should be speaking about them.
01:43I don't care about industry because I set my own rules and I march to my own tunes. I don't even
01:47do Fashion Week anymore. I democratically show my clothes on Instagram because why show to 500
01:52people when you can show to 5 million? And I think that when you want to create a visionary brand,
01:58you don't really have a proof of concept. You don't have a proof of concept for product. You
02:01don't have a proof of concept for marketing because you literally have to reinvent the
02:05wheel and start from scratch. I have never shied away from anything, whether it's gender fluidity,
02:12whether it's body positivity, whether it's skin color, whether it's embracing
02:19culture in a very modern way. When I talk about the consumers today, they are very well educated,
02:24very well researched, very well connected. And I think if you want to survive in a modern world,
02:33it's very important for you to understand that the values that you hold might not be the values
02:38that they necessarily admire. It's important to be able to, through osmosis, create a sort of
02:45bridge between the old and the new. We work very hard towards doing that constantly. I think we're
02:50going through both maximalism and minimalism at the same time. There is going to be no middle path.
02:55This has happened worldwide through all crises, whether it was the Great Depression, whether it
03:02was the Second World War, even if it's a pandemic right now, there are going to be two kinds of
03:08people. One kind of people who will have seen the suffering and they will learn from it and they
03:12will say that, you know, we need to be responsible. So there are going to be people who are going to
03:16be ethical shoppers. There are going to be people who are going to talk about sustainability.
03:20There are going to be people who are going to talk about ecology, circular economy, recycling,
03:24upcycling. And there is going to be another sort of customer who are going to say there's one life
03:28to live. Let's just blow it all up. And let's just let's just be reckless. So there is going
03:35to be exuberance and there is going to be restraint. And both of them will co-exist side by side.
Comments