This week, Nabil Shawkat is a know-it-all arms dealer with a fiendish, yet meticulous, interest in the world of fashion.
CAIRO: I have been in the fashion business for two or three decades now, mostly offering my clients collections that are usually sensible but imaginative, things you can wear in the office or for casual outings. I dabble in ethnic themes sometimes, and borrow liberally from the past, but I keep it conventional and practical. For my recent show, I was thinking Asian shawls, Azeri headdresses, and East Timor embroidery, but then I got busy in Tbilisi with a minor arms shipment and had no time to supervise the Manila show.
So imagine how I felt when I read this review in a top fashion magazine in the Philippines. “The recent collection by the Egyptian-born designer has brought the crowds in the Kol-Sal-Min Palace to their feet.
Imagine the stir that was caused by recent the nuclear test in Kilju, then multiply that by five or ten times. As models strutted up and down the catwalk, it was clear that the designer was offering a titillating feast to the eye as well as the mind. A full-length chador embroidered in ancient Asian motifs parted on the side to offer a sensual glimpse of the model’s bare chest. An elaborate head-to-toe costume exposed a low midriff tattooed with Kufi script. Was it Kandahar masquerading at the De Wallen of Amsterdam, or fetishism laced with the ambiguities of Europe’s immigrant communities?
As I pondered this conundrum, a man wearing what I can only describe as a cross between a business suit and a Tajik tribesman outfit, calmly walked to the end of the catwalk, dropped his cape to the floor and disappeared in a blaze of a mock bombing. Utterly magical, utterly frightening.
I don’t know how much you know about the design business. But people like me don’t do everything themselves. It’s mostly the advisers and artists who take charge. I offer the overall idea and then Mario takes over from Milan, helped by Daphne from Santa Fe and Sangrawee from Manila. In our last video-conference, three months ago, I gave them my instructions. “Let’s try some repressed sexuality, subtle frustration. Think unfulfilled dreams, disenchantment, and what else? Imagine sectarian mistrust. Picture the complex feelings of the misfit. I want people to look at the items and see through their souls. I want a sartorial equivalent of 9/11. I want the threat of a tactical nuclear bomb.give me a pang in the heart, shrapnel in the eye.
I didn’t mean it. I always do a little pep talk to motivate my assistants. What I had in mind was something visionary and evocative, not harrowing and suicidal. But my team took my words too literally. For a few days, I hoped against hope that news of the show would remain confined to Manila and Paris. But eventually a Qatari magazine picked it up and the networks followed. Within days, I was enemy of the people, the Bin Laden of the fashion industry. I have “flouted religious codes , “taken a jab at Muslim sensitivities , “joined the ugly chorus of Danish Satanists , and “taken sides with the infamous Jack Straw, to quote just a few commentators.
I should make a public apology, Mostafa from the interior ministry advised me. He also offered two bodyguards to stand at my door at all times, an unnecessary gesture since I own this Congolese talisman that renders me practically immortal. But I thanked him for the thought.
“Will you apologize? he asked.
“I will when Jack Straw does, I said. Then I called up Jack and threatened to kill him if he even thought of apologizing. “What kind of leaders would we be if we let the impressionable masses push us around, I told the British official.
You probably think I’m foolhardy, but years of dealing in contraband and consorting with the world’s richest crooks have taught me a thing or two. You can always beat the odds, if you just take a moment to think. That same afternoon, I instructed two of my trusted assistants to call the press with the dirt on me. Everything. My Mossad connections, my Nazi affiliations, my supremacist contacts, and my regular fraternizing with enemies of country and God. Within days, my name was mud. By the time I left for Vienna, the assistants had fed the media with the names of my companies. And editors across the country were up in arms calling on the public to boycott me.
In the ensuing weeks, about sixty companies suffered grave losses. A few were even firebombed. What no one knows, and that’s strictly confidential, is that none of those companies belonged to me. I had given the press the names of the companies of my rivals. The media bought it, the public loved it, and everyone had fun doing their muckraking best. I am now in Vienna arranging transportation of a few tactical warheads in the Far East. By the time I am back in late winter, after the Santa Fe show – which I promise to supervise more closely – I will have bought some of my rivals for next to nothing. Then I will have some explaining to do and a few hands to grease, but that’s nothing really. I like being a pariah for a while. I like being a very rich pariah.
And to think that Mostafa wanted me to apologize.
