It’s much more than fashion

Colombo Fashion Week’s Founder and Managing Director Ajai Vir looks back on a journey that started 20 years ago

It’s a huge year for Colombo Fashion Week as it celebrates 20 years having weathered a tsunami, war, pandemic and economic upheaval along the way, not to mention critics, to establish itself as the major platform for Sri Lankan fashion designers.

The Sunday Times sat down with the man at the helm, Founder and Managing Director Ajai Vir Singh to look beyond the runway and gain more insights into the work done by CFW.

Moving to Sri Lanka in the mid ’90s when creative industries were hard hit by the war, Ajai started thinking about the fashion industry, the lack of infrastructure and how to go about setting up a platform that could help it. It took some convincing to get people on board but ultimately the first CFW show took off in 2003 with six designers. The next couple of years were frustrating as there were no fashion schools producing designers back then but Ajai recalls 2007 as a turning point with the emergence of a number of young designers.

“I saw this young girl called Darshi Keerthisena. Then I saw a few other talents like Jacqueline Fernandez and the young photographer Sandun De Silva, and I said, ‘wow, these guys have suddenly come’ so there was a chance to build a platform that could help all the related industries to kind of raise themselves up.”

Encouraged, Ajai started to refine his vision to make the brand more than just fashion. “It is bigger, right? A whole ecosystem. But how long will it take? And I can't even do it and leave it, because once you start, you're mandated to keep going, otherwise, it's not going to work.”

2012 saw CFW move into sustainable fashion and eleven years later, it has the distinction of being known for having embraced and carried forward the concept. Ajai also spent two years developing the Responsible Meter, a ten-point system that evaluates a designer’s product and scores it beginning from how a designer develops their design and how the design will be disposed of, measuring just how accountable and transparent the garment is.

He says he realised that though everyone was talking about sustainability, they were not going towards it. “Why were the young designers around the world not moving towards sustainability? I realised that there is a huge barrier.”

While a few of the big-name brands around the world have moved towards sustainability, a huge chunk have not. What Ajai discovered during his research, was that most of the designers fall into small and medium size enterprise categories in relation to the economies they are in. With no one catering to them to take them into sustainability, the majority would not make the change to sustainable fashion.

Being well-acquainted with the supply chain of each designer in the country, he started searching for a way to take young designers or any designer who is SME towards sustainability, identifying the challenges faced from ideation to the end product.

The cherry on top would be if the score can be digitised so the consumer can scan it, creating a new dialogue between consumer and designer, showing each step taken by the designer in producing the garment, and driving responsible consumerism to the next level. “It's such a dream of mine. If we do this right, we will be the first country in the world probably where all the designers are sustainable because they are guided by this and no other country in the world has a tool for SME,” says Ajai, whose passion for this project is palpable.

CFW’s summer edition this week has Inclusivity in Growth as its theme – looking at being more inclusive of ethnicity, race, body type, and gender. “I'm hoping that because we are going on this path, all the industries will look for that. Maybe for the next season, but at least we are opening the door for it.”

His plan for the next five years also involves showing the strengths of Sri Lanka as a sustainable apparel sourcing destination through the Responsible Fashion Summit. “That will really make us connected as a sustainable tourism destination or sustainable destination because everyone follows those practices. That is a huge focus and inclusivity is an important part.”

Of course, funding is key for all this. “We look for agencies. I hope they understand what we do and that it's not just three days of showing. It's one year of work behind it and three days where you just see the nice part. What you don't see is the balance 360 plus other days that we work on.”

The Summer 2023 edition of Colombo Fashion Week hits the ramp from March 29 to April 2 at the Shangri-La Colombo.