GT Profile: For the Love of Design

Saba Ahmed talks to jewellery designer Zohra Rahman

On a cool Saturday afternoon, I walked past an orange tree and up a flight of exterior stairs straight into Zohra Rahman’s beautiful, cement-floored studio. The designer welcomed me with a big smile. We were surrounded by various metallic contraptions — a blowtorch, a rolling mill that creates metallic sheets, a large wooden table where cutting and delicate sawing takes place — as well as pieces of Zohra’s latest collection, “Unsent Letters.”

Months before I went over to Zohra’s studio, I had admired her commissioned pieces — rings, necklaces, even a knuckleduster. “Unsent Letters,” Zohra’s newest collection, is a stunning portrait of what we leave unsaid in our relationships.The pieces are individually handmade and hand engraved, mimicking the effect of ripped pages. Just think of silver and gold in the form of a ripped paper and you have a sense of the meticulousness involved in the creation of the collection. To me, Zohra’s jewellery boasts a sincerity of form, an elucidation of the basic tenets of design. The clean lines and construction conform to the body with pliable ease, respecting the bond between the piece and its wearer. The sparse and thoughtful use of colour calls for a simplification of fashion, which, as it so happens, characterizes the designer’s own style aptly: Zohra’s pieces are at once modern, tactile, functional.

‘No matter how ridiculous my sketch was, I would be wearing that very sketch on Eid’

“My design process is really personal; I usually look inwards rather than outwards,” Zohra tells me. “I get bored easily and keep experimenting with new shapes,” she says. After spending six years in London immersing herself in the art and craft of jewellery, the designer returned to Pakistan three years ago to create her own pieces. While at Central Saint Martin’s, Zohra worked with art jewellery that emphasizes personal expression and design above all else. It was after her move back to Lahore that Zohra shifted her focus to the shapes, lines, composition, and colours of her pieces. “I started looking into pure abstract design and wearability as a kind of design therapy,” she says with a wry smile.

Her collaboration with college friend Daniel Hurlin kindled an affinity for working with stones. The menswear designer was selected for the Hyères Fashion and Photography Festival in Southern France for which Zohra designed and produced all the jewellery, including the belt buckles and shoes accompanying his collection. The shoes were Peshawari chappals using new leathers and colours, making for some spectacular iterations of our beloved local shoe. And she did this much before Paul Smith!The collaboration with Daniel, she says, helped her “take the plunge and get started.” It was also the first time she seriously got into using gems in her pieces.

The existing types of jewellery available are either traditional designs or copies of big design houses such as Cartier and Tiffany’s

The resulting collection presented at Paris Mens Fashion week, “Moenjodaro,” was all gems and rivets, maintaining an edge of androgyny. But perhaps the most interesting part of the story behind the collection: Zohra scouted her male model at a traffic light in Gulberg. “A lot of the male models here are really buff whereas I was looking for someone with a leaner look,” she says. Having exhaustively searched through her friends and acquaintances, she found her model as he passed by her car headlights. “He was a natural and the shoot was a delight.”

Zohra’s artistic nature — the almost compulsive desire to think out of the box — dates back to her childhood. She spent a lot of time around her family’s garment production factory that produces the clothing line known to all as Generation. She would go to the factory and design her own clothes; she wore what she wanted and cut her own hair too. “No matter how ridiculous my sketch was, I would be wearing that very sketch on Eid,” says she, adding, “There were tassels everywhere, belts on all the shalwar kameez, I had a good time with it!”

“People spend a lot of money here, but they allow themselves to spend endlessly for weddings,” says Zohra. She talks of wedding goers trapped in a time warp, preoccupied by the jewellery of the maharajas ofthe Mughal era and the Raj. The desire not to push boundaries irks her, as does the proliferation of the same designs everywhere. The existing types of jewellery available are either traditional designs (some of which are lovely) or copies of big jewellery design houses such as Cartier and Tiffany’s. “What I’m trying to do here is something new,” she says. “Only when you try, through trial and error, do you find out what is possible and what is not.” Having previously designed in an industry (London), where all varieties of metals and tools were available at a moment’s notice, it was tough at first to be confronted with the lack of these things in Lahore.

Wedding goers are trapped in a time warp, preoccupied with a certain type of jewellery

But Zohra persevered. She set up an extensive workshop and began managing the production processes from the first to the last. Battling against the practical impediments to her artistic vision was not easy. “I’ll tell you, it causes a lot of grief trying to realize your designs! It’s taken a long time to get things going, but I hope it will pay off.” As with her unusual decision to choose a flower seller as a model, when trained kaarigars refused to follow instructions, Zohra hired a completely untrained apprentice and trained him in her own way. The same apprentice later chuckled how his sister was flabbergasted at the idea of a lady goldsmith. Watch out for this lady goldsmith, as her nimble designs take Pakistan by storm.

Shoot Photography by Umar Riaz