If you didn’t feel poor enough today, here’s a fun fact: Pakistani brand Rastah designed a $13,500 long coat that was recently spotted on American professional wrestler Seth Rollins during an episode of WWE.
The stunning “golden peacock” long coat is made of plush blue velvet, and features intricate embroidery using the traditional dabka technique, the fashion house wrote on its website.
The piece is, of course, made to order. Rollins paired the coat with a plain white shirt and flared white pants, but if you’re feeling extra bougie, you could order the matching pants with the coat — if you’re cool dropping an extra $920 for the privilege of completing the look.
Better yet? There’s more to come, according to Rastah’s comment on an Instagram post about the wrestler wearing their coat.
One thing is for sure: Rastah is perhaps the only local brand that dresses major celebrities across the world in streetwear, from Ibrahim Ali Khan and Honey Singh in India to Timothée Chalamet and Justin Bieber in the West. Rastah’s also dressed Pakistan’s most beloved British-Pakistani, Zayn Malik. There is no doubt about the brand’s creative genius in blending the traditional South Asian aesthetic with an elevated street-wear style.
What we weren’t aware of was the fact that they made clothes this expensive. A $500 hoodie? Sure. Your rich expat cousin probably owns a couple of those. But $13,500? And the golden peacock long coat is the second most expensive item on their website, with the two birds wool long coat at a whooping $14,500 being the crowning glory of the “Price: Highest to Lowest” filter.
Rastah is definitely starting their “global chapter”. A video posted to creative director Zain Ahmed’s Instagram showed him in Milan, sourcing fabric from the fashion capital of the world. Ahmed walked into the same fabric mill that creates cloth for haute couture houses Dior, Valentino and Prada and “asked what happens when the finest fabric in the world meets the hands of our artisans in Pakistan” in what he called a “union of Italian precision and South Asian soul.”
Although the strides the brand is making are commendable, one can’t help but feel as though the local Pakistani audience, whose culture Rastah heavily relies on, is not their customer base in the slightest and is barely being taken into consideration.
Sure, some people can afford the odd hoodie or sweatpants, but the Pakistani masses are not about to purchase $14,000 coats, and we doubt that’s what the brand wants. Let’s be honest, no coat needs to cost $14,000 unless it comes with a car and a house sewn into the lining. It’s not just out of reach for most Pakistanis; it’s orbiting another planet.
As one colleague so eloquently put it, “$14,000?! I wouldn’t consider that unless it was medical equipment required to save my life.”
However, it is evident that Rastah is setting its sights on the Western consumer, celebrities in particular. Their products, one can’t help but feel, exoticise South Asian culture to cater to the Western gaze, but in all fairness, what major South Asian label doesn’t do that?
A 2022 interview with Ahmed answers our question. The brand’s co-founder said, “We’re still stuck in this postcolonial hangover where if we get ‘goray ka thappa [a stamp of approval by a white person]’ we need this. So it clicked that for me to sell in Pakistan at this price point, I don’t really need to market in Pakistan and then all of that media will be distributed and consumed in Pakistan and it becomes that high-value content.”
And what about the high prices? Well, “If we aren’t making money, we’d have to fire employees, if we aren’t making any money, that means our work has not made an impact on customers, you can’t grow because we live in a capitalist economy.”
Perhaps the price point then isn’t entirely unfounded, but none of us are going to be able to purchase a Rastah long coat anytime soon.
