Zara Shahjahan, the famous Pakistani started her career in 2004 after graduating from the prestigious National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. Over the years her design house has grown beyond borders due to her understanding of different cultural genres of style. She opened her flagship store in her home town of Lahore in Spring 2012.
Recently the fashion designer had received a lot of negative comments from the public regarding the looks of the model who had featured in her recent shoot. Comments such as “looking like maids” were one of them.
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However, Designer Zara Shahjahan took to her own Instagram handle and called out the people hating on her models. She posted pictures of her models from her recent campaign to recall the experience.
She wrote “I had a shoot in Turkey. My team left a day earlier and the day I and the model had to leave, Turkey announced 15 days of quarantine. We were left with no choice but to hire models from there.”
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The designer further elaborated on how “I tried to find girls who look South Asian and finally found these two very stunning Mexican models who flew from LA for the campaign. We were very happy, the campaign looked really beautiful and we launched, but what happened after is quite disturbing.”
These pictures started getting a lot of hate. ‘They look like maids’ is one comment which disturbed me the most,” the designer added.
“Are we these people? Why do we want the models to be white and sultry?” Zara questioned.
She concluded her social media post by thanking God for her loyal customers, “Thankgod for my loyal customers who know my brand and the collection was sold out but I don’t seem to get the irritation of a lot of women to these two pictures.”
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Shahjahan’s post on her Instagram was well received and appreciated by her followers who supported the designer’s stance and voiced their concerns against those standards that looked down upon darker skin tones and remarks that demean people from a certain socioeconomic background.
However, Zara Shahjahan was not the only one to receive hate in relation to using Dark-skin models. A couple of months back the elegant actor Syra Yousuf had received some negative criticism on her skin tone when she posted a picture of herself in bridal wear.
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