Colombo is rewriting South Asia’s fashion playbook

Before Colombo had a fashion week, and much before sustainable fashion became a buzzword-riddled marketing category anyone could buy into, Ajai Vir Singh often argued that a country famous for making other people’s clothes could also be trusted with its own name on the label.Through the years, Singh, who went to Sri Lanka as an expatriate in the 90s, eyed a nascent market with a relatively modest pool of contemporary designers and built a fashion week. Everything Colombo Fashion Week (CFW) has tried to become since — a South Asian design hub, a sustainability showcase, and now a BRICS-adjacent cultural platform — is built on the belief that a manufacturing economy can also be a moral axis of mindful style.

Ajai Vir Singh argued that a country famous for making other people’s clothes could also be trusted with its own name on the label. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement Earlier this year, as I sat through the shows at CFW’s latest edition, this future-forward ethos was apparent. But it also left me a little apprehensive about the future of such exceptional talent.

Unlike India and its fashion weeks with hefty production budgets, how would they get the attention they deserve? More importantly, why were fashion insiders not talking about Sri Lanka with more fervour yet?“In Colombo, you may see a designer’s collection that was created for the ramp, and that’s likely the end of it.

There’s not necessarily an extension waiting,” says Annika Fernando, who has run the cult multi-brand store Paradise Road in the island country for close to 15 years. “A designer here might make and sell just six dresses a month.” Most local designers offer one-off pieces and produce them in small runs.

Annika Fernando runs the cult multi-brand store Paradise Road in Colombo | Photo Credit: Special arrangement What reframes the storySri Lanka’s own garment factories, the same ones producing for behemoths such as Nike and Victoria’s Secret at an industrial scale, aren’t built to handle a local designer’s 15-piece batch. Fernando explains that the factories are calibrated for global brands’ volumes and, due to other restrictions in place, stops local designers from tapping into the same production line. Women busy within a textile factory in Colombo | Photo Credit: Getty Images That’s the paradox around which I kept circling.

An island with more garment manufacturing infrastructure than anywhere else in South Asia (its apparel export value per capita is approximately $242, according to the Sri Lanka Department of Census & Statistics, and direct garment-sector jobs per capita stand at roughly 1 per 63 residents, according to a report by the U.S. International Trade Administration) cannot provide adequate support for its own designers to scale.

Ironically, however, that’s also what allows Colombo to function more like an atelier culture than a retail pipeline.Strong domestic marketMeanwhile, the other problem that has been holding Sri Lanka back seems to be solving itself. Indian designer Rajesh Pratap Singh, who was a part of CFW this year, is blunt about what Colombo needs: “A strong domestic market that is independent of markets outside.”

India’s fashion industry has had decades and a billion-plus population’s headstart on domestic demand, but Sri Lanka’s 22 million are only now starting to buy local in a big way. (A surge in national pride, positive economic shifts, and a design renaissance that is respectful of the past yet daringly visionary are helping this.) Rajesh Pratap Singh is blunt about what Colombo needs: “A strong domestic market that is independent of markets outside.”

CFW director Fazeena Rajabdeen says roughly 90% of the style-conscious crowd wear Sri Lankan labels today, against what she describes as near-zero 20 years ago, when everyone at fashion week “would be wearing an international brand to see a show full of local labels”. CFW director Fazeena Rajabdeen says roughly 90% of the style-conscious crowd wear Sri Lankan labels today | Photo Credit: Special arrangement Don’t get it twisted; Sri Lanka is far more than its struggles. If India’s fashion imagination runs towards abundance — embellishments, embroidery — Sri Lanka’s runs towards a modern yet rooted restraint.

Nearly everyone I speak to describes that restraint as a design philosophy rather than what many might perceive as a limitation. “We’re not as textile-rich as India,” says Fernando. “That’s not our greatest strength.”

She traces it back to a talk she attended in Mumbai, where the consensus was that Sri Lankan design is defined by conscious editing and a pared-back aesthetic, which can be tied directly to the island’s other exports, like its tropical-modernist architecture — the Geoffrey Bawa lineage of clean lines built for heat and light. Fashion’s version of the same logic is pared back, a little raw, “a little less ready for the expectations of bulk international retail, maybe”. And that untreated quality, in Fernando’s words, is the charm.

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