Female Beauty

The Afghanistan capital Kabul enjoyed the first fashion show in decades this weekend as Italian designer Gabriella Ghidoni and her Afghan partner was showing her fashion collection. The show, which made the news on Afghanistan’s Tolo TV channel, attracted an audience of expatriates and well-to-do Afghans. Models glided down the runway in new takes traditional garb – burqas included – to mark the semi-historic event in front of expatriates and well-heeled Afghans at a luxury hotel amid the rubble and poverty of the capital.

“The models should have been Afghan, but we know that many families still don’t allow their daughters to do things like this,” said a member of the audience, Nooria Farhad.
“It will be much better and more effective if in future our Afghan models do fashion shows and show the world Afghan clothes. I hope one day we’ll have Afghan models,” she said.
Bank chairman Haji Ali Akbar said, “This is really important for the country, it’s a great morale booster for the people. It also shows that Afghanistan is going toward stability and the platform for foreign investment and businesses is opening day by day.”

Clothes made from Afghan textiles, including fashion burqas, conservatively cut clothes that included designer burqas were expatriate women accompaniment of traditional local music, to the disappointment of some in the audience. One of the designers behind the show, Italian Isabella Ghidoni, told Reuters said they did not want to court controversy by using models from the conservative Muslim country. “We invited a lot of Afghan women to attend the show but not to be models,” said Italian designer Gabriella Ghidoni, who organized the show with an Afghan partner. Another member of the audience said the Saturday night show was a boost for the city which has seen bloody anti-government and anti-foreign riots and several bomb blasts in recent weeks. 

Ms Ghidoni and her partner, Afghan designer Zolaykha Sherzad, started off by training women in fashion and jewellery design and went on to sell their creations in Kabul shops. Sherzad said people used to hold small fashion shows in Kabul before the war begin in the late 1970s.
These days there was a market for fashion in the city, although it may not be obvious, she said, “There’s not much in terms of the fashion we see in the West but there is fashion within a private environment, within the houses.”

The Taleban, who ruled the country in the 1990s before being ousted in 2001, forced women to wear the muslim clothing, all-enveloping burqa but nearly five years after the hard-line Islamists were ousted to cover themselves from head to toe, many women still choose to wear burqas when they are out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 9:49 am and is filed under Beauty, Career, Fashion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.