The Design Process by Mahnoor Sandhu

The essence of Rejuve is the spirit of the individuals who sport designers’ identities, looking for the art in life around them. These individuals are the replenishing agents of the Pakistani Fashion Industry, ready to usher in a new era of inclusion, liberation, and enhancement.

To bring these spirits to light, Rejuve got in touch with Ms. Mahnoor Sandhu – one of these lights who will rekindle true art within Pakistani Fashion. Read her story, in her words, for truly unfiltered insight.

I am a graduate of Pakistan Institute of Fashion and Design, year 2018 and I majored in fashion design from PIFD.

Momin Sagheer, who is my boss right now is one of my closest friends from school. He was studying textile engineering in Austria at the time since his family has been in the wholesale embroidery business for decades now. They wanted to branch out which required hiring young designers that is where I came in the equation. He asked me to show them the graduating thesis display at my school and instead of hiring someone from my senior batch, they asked me if I would be interested but I had to wait a year because I had not graduated yet. In that following year, I learnt more about multi-head embroidery and multi head machinery and even used this textile technique for the production of my thesis.

I am currently working for a multi head embroidery start up for almost a year now as a fashion designer, and a creative and aesthetic manager. We are a small team so the environment is very intimate and right now we are just aiming to perfect our product in our own eyes so we know that it is worthy of being sold to the customer.

I use my aesthetics at every step of the design process. If I have an idea for a design in mind I look up for stimulating visuals that would help me put my idea to paper and then I construct a layout for the embroidery which is further developed into a detailed miniature sketch or an illustration. Sometimes it is a specific colour that we want to work with or even a motif or a design element that seems interesting enough to make a design out of it. This is followed by the construction of a sketch that is made to scale. During this stage, I review the elements used in the designs individually as well as in the composition they are being used. For example a certain type of flower may seem visually appealing in a picture but the embroidery version might not turn out as good. It is my job to prevent such things from happening. I have to know what would look good and how it has to be placed. Once the sketch is completed it is not taken to a computer where the design is digitized for the machine. The color balancing, construction of the elements, and design balancing is looked over by me at this point. When the sample is ready, the last stage is to get it stitched. There is not a lot of experimentation at this point because we cannot compromise the embroidery which is a challenge of its own.

I think every individual's ideas about fashion differ from the other because these ideas are solely built on personal experiences. The people I work for have been working in the wholesale market, they view the product from a mass market and economic viewpoint. People like us, fresh graduates very much like me are more eager to teach them our new and as we perceive them to be 'improved' ways rather than learning the status quo first.

The fashion market is nothing like it was before. I think we have lost our way, we have stopped valuing out crafts. We have so many traditional techniques, so many original ideas ranging from ajrak, phulkari, ralli, the list is endless. These breathtaking crafts are being sidelined for things that are just fads whereas these techniques have been carried out for centuries. Fashion brands in Pakistan have stopped being original, the quality of fabric has deteriorated with prices going up by the day. Almost every design or lawn print is just another image from Pinterest. The amount of research I have done in the past year has astonished me because you find out all of it is just plagiarized or copied in the name of inspiration.

After working for some time I have learnt and now strongly believe that evolution of any form has to be overtime as well as organic. I believe I have evolved myself. If I evaluate my performance from the start, there are so many creative decisions I made in the past that I would not repeat, but that is the thing about change, you have to accept it, learn from it, and move forward.