There are those who have learnt to 'filter', and have emerged with a wardrobe which is Western in thought but desi at heart.
For quite some time now, peo-ple in Pakistan have started believing that fashion can be literally anything. The problem is that it ends up being just a few people's anything. Most women in Pakistan dress up not the way they want to, but the way others want them to. For a lazy day at home, the BMW Set will inevitably go for faded Levi's, the Toyota woman might decide on a sleeveless cotton salwar kameez, whilst the 800cc Suzuki owners have probably never experienced something even remotely resembling "a lazy day at home". Grandmothers and even some mothers have begun to blush at the mention of how their daughters are dressing up. What the elders cannot comprehend is why their kin has suddenly taken to baring themselves? Though excessive skin exposure is still far from the norm in Pakistan, plunging necklines and seductive designs are fast becoming the accepted dress code at upper crust parties. One fashion journalist refers to this craze for showing skin as "a retro-reaction"—to the opulence Pakistani culture has been praised and, in some cases, condemned for.
What is wrong with opulence, you may ask? Nothing really, but at times Pakistanis have been known to forget that opulence should have its limits; what else would you call a five-day wedding celebration (where the bride is a divorcee and the groom a widower), during which the bride's mother had a hard time limiting her dresses to five, each costing the equivalent of a honeymoon in Singapore?
Maybe it is the increased exposure to the West (Pakistan does have a large number of Internet and satellite television addicts, and the super-elite travels easily to the West) that has made youngsters develop this distaste for something as anti-West as our culture. Maybe we're just suffering from a bad case of neo-colonialism. Or maybe (and this is a distinct possibility) all the international bashing that our country's leaders have been receiving has forced us to downplay our own worth and so blindly follow the West.