Is anyone buying lawn anymore?

Are women still buying lawn the way they used to about five years ago? Have they set aside budgets for the lawn brands of their choice, buying a certain number of suits that will last them all summer? They are, because you can't survive the Pakistani summer without a few breathy, easy breezy lawns lined up in your wardrobe. Chances are, though, that they are buying much less than they used to.

There's also a surety that they aren't queuing up to buy luxury lawn, elbowing through crowds to get that one coveted suit that was quickly getting sold out. They're more likely to muse upon the suit that they like, surfing through the online catalogue several times, zooming in and zooming out on the details on their cellphones and then, maybe - just maybe - placing an order.

There was a time when luxury lawn, especially the ones with designer tags attached to them, used to attract crazed crowds of buyers. It was a phenomenon unique to Pakistan. Customers would be enthralled that high-end designer labels would trickle down to the mass market with affordable lawn collections. They would wake up at seven in the morning and happily become part of long queues outside lawn exhibition halls.

Lawn from Image's 2023 Lawnkari collection

There were women who would have buckets full of water in their cars so that the minute they bought their lawn suits, they could shrink the fabric and rush it off to the tailor. And once the lawn got stitched, there was a rush to wear it first and you'd start seeing the really popular designs everywhere - cafes, the mall, at work, even at school parent-teacher meetings! Luxury lawn got Pakistani women very, very excited and based on this, more and more brands would enter the fray every year.

It was a phenomenon unique to Pakistan that could be written about endlessly. But I refer to it in the past tense here.

With far too many contenders entering the market, a deluge of unstitched options launching every month and, most significantly, the rising costs of inflation, lawn simply doesn't inspire the mass hysteria that it used to. The woman who would buy seven suits every summer is now buying four, or maybe even three. There are many others who have opted to eschew the tailor altogether and buy pret. And while the high-end designer tagline is still a very coveted one, cash flows across the country have receded and buying power just isn't what it used to be.

Farah Talib Aziz's lawn is in the Rs15,000 range

Maliha Aziz, who heads...