Home Fashion Daughter of Cruel Uzbek Dictator to Resell Hippie Nostalgia

Daughter of Cruel Uzbek Dictator to Resell Hippie Nostalgia

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Although, one can’t really give Guli much credit for simply using traditional fabrics and cuts. To give her praise for making a traditional caftan jacket with atlas would be like giving Karl Lagerfeld praise just for showing a collection of standard French berets or giving Vivienne Tam credit for simply using Chinese silk. It is great to draw on these classic elements, but it is what is done to modernize or reinterpret them that really makes one a designer. All Guli seemed to do was essentially take the silhouette of your average draped or sheer Versace dress, slap a traditional Uzbek pattern on it and call it a day. Or even lazier still: a couple of looks were achieved merely by throwing a caftan on a model with a nude one piece bathing suit on—she couldn’t even be bothered to put some kind of thought in the detail or embroidery on the swimwear! It’s almost like she thought just using the traditional fabrics and cuts would carry her collection completely. It may have also been an editorial choice, since one could think more than a nude suit underneath would take away from the caftan, but Indian designer Naeem Khan, for example has been putting embroidered caftans over other stylized pieces since Spring 2007 and they’ve never come across as this lazy or this indifferent.

There were some original silhouettes—but they were original for a reason, as in they haven’t been done before for a reason: they are patently unflattering.  Several of the pieces also came across as not well made (though at a distance I could not fairly judge this) or to be mismatched (and not mismatched in the carefully planned way fabrics are being mismatched right now like at Timo Weiland… just straightforwardly mismatched).

In sum, was GULI a complete disaster? No. Was it inspiring and original? No. Were there some pretty and wearable dresses? Yes. Would the pleasure of wearing them be worth the psychological baggage of knowing that she is capitalizing on the traditional ethnic designs of people her father has repeatedly abused and in some cases even boiled to death? Definitely not.

Guli.
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4 COMMENTS

  1. She is shitty herself. Her dad is not that greedy at least. She had destroyed so many lives, some godfathers would be jealous.

  2. Malaikah, Jessie – if it was just a question of her having a murderous dictator for a dad, then you’re right that you can’t judge her for that on its own. However, she is known to be up to her neck in the horrendous Uzbek regime, and she is hugely corrupt personally. It stinks that she’s being given a platform in the West.

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