Tashkent`s Central Asian Fashion Moment

Godfrey Deeny
October 16th, 2009 @ 00:35 AM - Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Welcome to the New Silk Road.

If there`s been any growth industry in the past decade, it`s been in launching fashion weeks, as cities all over the planet created fashion seasons to boost their local fabric making and apparel manufacturing business, support local design and creative talent or simply garner some international prestige.

A bit of all three elements is evident at Art Week Style.Uz, a one-week long festival in Tashkent, Uzbekistan designed to trumpet all things creative in this evocative, tree-lined central Asian capital.

This year`s edition, which opened Monday with an exhibition of the country`s remarkable fabrics and ethnic jewelry and climaxes Sunday with a concert by rocker Sting, seems particularly well-timed.

Two collections, Gucci and Dries Van Noten, shown during the recent Spring 2010 shows in Europe, referenced Uzbekistani ikats, woven and faintly faded silk and cotton fabrics.

At Gucci, creative director Frida Giannini found inspiration from a carpet bought in a Tashkent market, but morphed that into a hard-edged catwalk look that infused folkloric geometrics into some exceptional cocktail dresses where the patterns were re-imagined as safety pins, zips or tensile-like struts of stretch fabric.

At Dries Van Noten, the Belgium designer fused Uzbek motifs with batiks from Bali and chinoiserie from China into a collection that was polished but never stiff.

The Tashkent season`s driving force is Gulnara Karimova, whose father, Islam Karimov, is the country`s president, an orphan and former Communist leader re-elected in 2007 with 88 percent of the vote.

“Our idea is not a typical fashion week, but a week that unites fine arts, photography, collectors, concerts and lots of young talent,” Karimova told a packed press conference of some 600 on Thursday evening.

The week`s primary mover is the Fund Forum, a cultural organization of which Karimova is chairman. Through grants, aid to creative talent and support for arts and crafts, Fund Forum, she said, had materially benefited 2.3 million people in Uzbekistan.

Karimova is a one-time rock singer, foreign diplomat, telecoms businesswoman and, latterly, designer. The swankiest soiree of the local season was her collaborative effort with Chopard, with whom she has developed a collection called Guli. A pendant from this collection was auctioned in a joint runway show featuring the Swiss jeweler`s finest sparklers and a series of evening looks by Karimova. The $53,000 raised will go towards a UNICEF charity.

Chopard and Karimova first unveiled the line last month in Milan at a gala dinner attended by everyone from soccer players Paolo Maldini and Lionel Messi to designers Eva Cavalli and Ermanno Scervino.

Karimova`s own collection was largely eveningwear, and she turned out to be a skilled draper whose flowing chiffon robes with multiple shoulder straps and smart cocktail dresses were highly flattering. She showed many of them in fiery red, not unlike Valentino's sexy signature color.

“It`s [in the] early days so far, but we are very ambitious for Guli," said Chopard vice president Caroline Gruosi-Sheufele. "Our goal is to retail this collection in our chain of 150 boutiques worldwide.”

The season also featured runway presentations of the Fall 2009 collections of Oscar de la Renta, Valentino and Sonia Rykiel, though without the presence of those designers.

All three shows were staged in the oddly named Youth Creativity Palace, a large temple like space that, like so many buildings here, is topped by a Mosque-style cupola.

Four fifths of the population of Uzbekistan is Muslim, but of a moderate variety; no women in Tashkent, the capital with 2.5 million people, wear burqas, and very few of the audience at any fashion event wore head scarves. Unlike many parts of the former Soviet Union, where the detritus of failed industries left a ragged air, Tashkent's broad, traffic free boulevards, built when under Russia hegemony, are clean.

A key goal of the season is to develop links with global fashion trends and encourage interaction between artists of different cultures. Style.Uz, for instance, also invited in U.K. designers Basso & Brooke, a U.K. house famed for its use of dramatic prints – their latest collection was a psychedelic look at nature. And, the day after the house showed here, designers Bruno Basso and Christopher Brooke headed off to the city of Marghilan to work with local craft weavers on developing new materials.

Marghilan has been famous for its fine silks for centuries, supplying Baghdad, Cairo and Athens bazaars via the Great Silk Road. It still boasts Uzbekistan`s largest traditional silk maker, the Yodgorlik Silk Factory.

Source: http://www.fashionwiredaily.com/first_word/fashion/article.weml?id=2877