There once was a boy with dark honey colored eyes, this boy was bewildered with the world and its workings. He was fascinated by all the detail, the detail of all the colors of the rainbow that frowned amongst the smoke of clouds. All the detail of the peacock’s feathers and the crystals on the chandelier. One day as he saw a beautiful dress, he was drawn in by its shine. When he went in to take a closer look , he saw a tiny stray piece of thread hanging from the lonely dress. The boy pulled it out and the dress started coming undone. It was intriguing to this curious boy as to how a thread could be the sole cause of such a magnificent creation, so he found himself a thread and started weaving, he wove and he wove and he wove a world around him. With queens and peasants and elephants, with pyramids and angels and storms and warriors, with geishas and ships and phoenixes.
He wove the forms of his obsession.
Ali Xeeshan spelled with an ‘X’ that one can see in his demeanor that has an almost royal air to it. A form of graceful, accurately learned elegance, even in the wave of his hand would make one think that he probably is an heir to some industrialist’s fortune and has spent most of his time in the far, more developed countries. It is quite the contrary as he explains that he comes from a fairly conventional Pakistani background with a caring father who owns a small business.
Having graduated in 2006 with an internship with eight different firms, Ali raced to the runway in 2010 with his debut show at the fashion week. He became fairly acclaimed and opened his first boutique last year in Lahore.
In these times where upon picking upon a stone one would find a group of designers scrambling out from under it, one would be under the cynical impression that fashion is the “thing” of the season. A person simply has to like clothes ‘enough’; there are no hardships in such a profession of delicacy. Well try getting kidnapped. One finds out that it has not been all silk and chiffon, as Ali, before the Designer Ali Xeeshan was discovered by the fashion planet’s telescope, was devotedly working with a well known “diamond studded woman”, who threatened him to sign a contract in a situation where he was held in an anonymous house for about twenty-two hours. This incident took place rather immediately after he got an offer from Zara of a paid internship. Once he was released, the matter was taken up to higher authorities and the contract was considered factitious and the woman was left on her own with all that shining respect stripped away.
As any commoner, one would think of the fashion world to be this fairytale where everything is extravagant and superficial, crowded with the bored elites of a rather repugnant and fragile kingdom, but after engaging with Ali’s work, the artist inside would think that even the seemingly simple task of making clothes, can be an art. The love of life burns fiercely in his earth brown eyes, even when he whole heatedly laughs upon reading a forwarded text message.
Appearances do matter, they describe personalities, they describe various humans with all the different threads of thoughts that stitch up their different forms. A designer defines those foggy forms, brings them into a clearer focus.
When Ali asks the waiter to bring his tea in a white cup instead of the blue floral one, one would feel a scent of specific arrogance in the air but when he pulls his friends’ left over chicken towards himself one is conditioned to think that the depth of his character runs even deeper than the philosophy behind his designs.
Ali Xeeshan walks like he is on the runway even when he is walking towards his car yet that boy can still be found, running across from pillar to pillar with a fine strand of thread grasped firmly in his palm.