Re: Finally! A Fashion Week for Pakistan
instepprofile
Introducing Simon Lock
The fashion community knows him as the elusive CEO of IMG Asia Pacific. Who is this guy promising to get Pakistan Fashion Week up and running and more importantly how does he propose to do it?
By Muniba Kamal
Simon Lock cuts an interesting figure. Bald, clean shaven with a stylish tuft of a beard just below his lower lip, his is an international look. His wardrobe is simple. Jeans, shirts, jackets. You have to travel light when you live out of a suitcase.
This interview has been conducted primarily over the phone, all over the Asia Pacific. Simon was in Kuala Lumpur where he is working on an Ecostyle show (eco-friendly fashion is a rage these days), in China where he was finalizing plans for the opening ceremony of a casino being launched by the Ho family in Macau and working on building the longest catwalk in the world for the Beijing Olympics at Tiananmen Square, in Hong Kong where is working on a Luxury Week and also at Mount Buller near Melbourne where he is a ski instructor when he takes off with his family for that much needed break. Not that he ever ends up taking it. Simon Lock leads a life which is always on.
Simon is not an average corporate executive. He is in fact, single handedly responsible for making Australia a viable stop on the global fashion circuit. It was only a decade ago, that Australia held its first fashion week. It was organised and run by a company called Australian Fashion Innovators of which Simon was the CEO. His company had been working with Australian fashion labels for some time, marketing them both within and out of Australia. After visiting the main fashion weeks, (New York, Paris Milan, London) Simon Lock started figuring out how to put Australia on the fashion circuit. He had more doubters than supporters and finances weren’t easy to get. To organize the first Australian Fashion Week, Lock plundered money from his other business concern Spin Communications, a marketing company.
The first AFW in 1996 generated as much hype as it did brickbats. 25 Australian designers participated while many preferred to stay away from the event. AFW was accused of being a huge publicity stunt with no real benefit to designers, which chewed up too much government funding. Simon admitted that his company lost 500,000 dollars at the end of it, but was optimistic even then. “We believe that in the long term there will be a lot of commercial value in being the company that owns Australian Fashion Week. It is a long-term investment,” he said in an interview to BRW in 1997.
Yet, there were naysayers, amongst them fashion critic Marion Hume who came to see AFW and in 1997 was hired as Editor by Australian Vogue. A great supporter of Simon Lock’s AFW initiative, she nevertheless doubted him when he claimed that the event he masterminded would put Sydney and Melbourne amongst the great fashion capitals of the world.
“Whatever he says about it becoming the fourth or fifth city, it will never be thus. We’re on the wrong side of the world, our seasons are upside down and we breed designers who are quite brilliant when it comes to clothes that you need in a warm climate, but when it comes to tailoring a coat, don’t have a clue,” she told the Sun Herald in 2002.
Her word then seem to echo the same doubts that so many people from our fashion community voice about Pakistan Fashion Week. If history repeats itself, they should look at the outcome of Australian Fashion Week. By 2004, AFW was definitely in the top five in the fashion circuit and by 2006 it was commercially larger, in terms of wholesale orders placed, than London. Not that Pakistan Fashion Week is going to be an easy sail. Starting something new and impossibly huge never is, yet it is important to believe that it is possible. At least, that is exactly what Simon Lock seems to have done. Had he wavered, he would not have been making presentations to Pakistani designers on how to make their fashion week a success, neither would Victoria Beckham be recommending Sass and Bide jeans (a Sydney label) to the European and American market.
Despite taking the initial hit in 1996, Simon Lock’s company Australian Fashion Innovators had hit on a winning formula that got noticed in the business world. In 2001 AFI bid for 7th on Sixth, the management of New York’s Olympus and Mercedes Benz Fashion Weeks. They lost the bid to IMG (International Management Group). Mark McCormack, the founder of IMG had decided to step into fashion. When asked about that tussle with the company he now works for, Simon laughs at the memory. “We were a little mouse trying to outbid a lion,” he says. “A few years later, they approached me and it was the right time to become partners.”