Sri Lanka Fashion Design Industry

      Developing the Sri Lanaka Fashion Design Industry

There are number of measure that can be taken in order to develop the Sri Lankan Fashion Design Industry. Since the industry is still in its developing ear, these are vital and also should be taken as soon as possible. Following are some suggestions which can be used to uplift the standards of the industry.

• Enforcing legal protection for Fashion Designs. 

Considering the developed countries, there are laws to protect almost everything and it is applicable to the Fashion Design Industry as well. Design Piracy Prohibition Act which is an Act to amend title 17 to the United State Code, to extend protection to fashion design and for other purpose and Stop Counterfeiting in Manufactured Goods Act which amends the United State federal criminal code to revise provisions prohibiting the trafficking in counterfeit can be taken as two good example of protecting the design rights of Fashion Designers.

• Setting up a Professional Body to represent Fashion Designers.

As mentioned earlier, a Professional Body is a vital factor in developing and safeguarding an industry. Anyhow, Sri Lanka Fashion Designers are yet to be formed as an accepted legal entity. Over the last decade, at least 1000 Fashion Designers have been produced by Sri Lanka but they still lack a Professional Body and pre-set standards that match the country.

Therefore, either the government or an accepted institute like University of Moratuwa or Academy of Design should take the initiative to form a legal association to represent either Fashion Designers or Design Artists in a whole.

Challenge from the Ethnic and Religious views.

Sri Lanka is a multi-racial and multi-cultural South Asian country. More or less depending on own religious and racial values, people used to have generally common idea on the way they dress. However, the adoption of fashion differs significantly within different ethnic and religious groups.

Because of the Sinhalese majority and Tamils who make up nearly 90% of the country's population, the saree is one of the most common and popular dresses despite being extremely impractical for an active and busy lifestyle. Among Tamil women, sarees with lot of artwork and vivid colours are popular but Sinhalese women go for plain sarees and sarees without clearly visible artwork with a higher interest in lighter colours. Anyway, the contribution of Fashion Designers in saree market is very poor when considering the consumption of sarees. Most of the good designs are coming from India where Sri Lankans have an attitude that Indian imported sarees are of good quality and design. However, the situation changes when it comes to wedding dresses. The Buddhist-Sinhalese culture mostly uses the saree as the traditional wedding dress and a lot of effort is put in order to make it as beautiful and pleasant as possible. Therefore, the local Fashion Designers get the opportunity of designing wedding sarees but they still have to compete with the readymade designs which are suitable as wedding sarees.

 Indian cultural dresses like shawls and Panjabi dresses are popular among Tamil and Muslim females of 15-40 age group. Most of these are decorated with vivid colours and patterns which resemble Indian and Arabic artwork. However, the market for these are limited because of the Sinhalese majority is more interested Western clothing concepts. Currently, it is seen that the effect of religious and ethnic backgrounds is losing its grip on people's dress. Muslim women can be seen with denim jeans and they often consider the shawl as a fashionable piece of clothing.

All these again change upon the social background. Though the Sri Lankan culture generally sees women with miniskirts or deep neck blouses and men with V collar shirts or cargo pants as inappropriate, it is different when it comes to social events like musical shows or get-togethers. The upper middle class and upper class people are quite comfortable with such dresses and the others also don't see it as inappropriate.