Fashion Pakistan Week | Pakistan, Asia
Fashion Pakistan Week: How Pakistan Built a Fashion Industry Amid Turmoil
Fashion Pakistan Week (FPW) was founded in 2009 by the Fashion Pakistan Council (FPC), a Karachi-based body created by designer Maheen Khan to give Pakistan’s fashion industry a proper professional platform for the first time. Khan served as the Council’s founding chairperson, with designer Deepak Perwani later taking on the role of chairman; both remained closely tied to FPW for most of its run, and both are still counted among Pakistan’s most influential designers today. Over close to a decade and a half, FPW grew from a fragile first edition into the country’s most recognised fashion week, before it, too, quietly stopped running in recent years — a casualty less of any single event than of Pakistan’s broader economic pressures on the fashion industry.
Founding Amid Turmoil
FPW’s first edition was never guaranteed to happen. TIME’s coverage of the debut event described an event postponed twice and moved venues over security concerns, with a major sponsor withdrawing days beforehand and international buyers advised against travelling to Karachi at all. Deepak Perwani, reflecting on the constant instability at the time, asked when there was ever a moment something wasn’t going wrong in the country — and insisted the show would go on regardless. It did: designer Sonya Battla opened the inaugural FPW with a collection titled “Conflict in Karachi,” a tribute to the city’s women built from bold, metalwork-embellished silhouettes that turned the surrounding unrest into the show’s own subject matter, rather than something to work around.
Famous Designers and Faces
FPW went on to become the runway of record for Pakistani fashion’s biggest names. Alongside founders Maheen Khan and Deepak Perwani, regular participants over the years included Sana Safinaz, Nomi Ansari, HSY (Hassan Sheheryar Yasin), Faraz Manan, Shamaeel Ansari, Umar Sayeed, Nilofer Shahid, Zainab Chottani and Nida Azwer, among many others who built their careers partly on FPW’s stage. The event also regularly drew Pakistan’s television and film stars as showstoppers rather than only professional models: Gulf News’s coverage of an early edition singled out actors Imran Abbas, Danish Taimoor and Javed Shaikh, along with model Mehreen Syed and titleholder Sarish Khan, walking for designers on the runway — a blend of high fashion and celebrity culture that helped FPW cross over into Pakistan’s wider entertainment press, not just its trade coverage.
Venues
Unlike Islamabad Fashion Week’s one-off staging at the diplomatically prestigious Serena Hotel, FPW’s venues were more consistently drawn from Karachi’s five-star hotel circuit — most notably the Marriott Hotel, where the first edition was held, and later the Pearl Continental, which hosted several Spring/Summer editions in the 2010s. That choice was practical as much as aesthetic: Karachi’s luxury hotels offered the secure, self-contained venues that a high-profile public fashion event needed during years when security logistics shaped almost every major gathering in the city.
Why It Stopped
FPW’s disappearance mirrors a wider decline in Pakistan’s independent fashion week circuit rather than a single dramatic ending. Dawn Images’ 2024 review of Pakistan’s fashion scene described a local industry now grappling with a volatile economy and a real shortage of sponsorship, to the point that a runway show of any kind had become a rare, almost nostalgic sight rather than a fixture of the yearly calendar. Where fashion councils once ran their own independently sponsored weeks, the article noted, surviving runway shows in Pakistan increasingly take shape as smaller components of government trade events, such as the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan’s TEXPO exhibitions, rather than as standalone productions in their own right. FPW’s fate reflects that shift: the commercial and sponsorship model that funded an independent, celebrity-driven fashion week for over a decade became increasingly difficult to sustain.
Legacy
FPW’s influence on Pakistan’s fashion industry is difficult to overstate — it helped launch or elevate the careers of many of the country’s best-known designers and normalised the idea of a professionally run, internationally-minded fashion week in a market that had never had one before. Pakistan’s fashion industry has since regrouped around LAAM Fashion Week, a Lahore-based, runway-to-e-tail platform that launched in February 2026 and streams collections live to more than 120 countries — a very different, digitally-native model built for the economic realities that FPW itself struggled against in its later years.