Synergizing Critical and Corpus Based Approaches in Studying Pakistani Lawn Fashion Discourse

Abstract

The study examines the social media verbal representation of apparel industry in Pakistani for which it delimits itself to female eastern wear apparel specifically branded and designer lawn only. The paper draws its framework from Barthes’ theory of fashion system. I built a specific corpus after observing Instagram posts of eight highly followed brands to define the rhetoric of Pakistani apparel fashion brands and the counter hegemonic discourse of bloggers and fashion writers published online commenting on these designer lawn collections. AntConc is used for corpus analysis of concordances, collocates and key words in context (KWIC). The findings reveal that in Pakistan lawn is not a mere comfortable clothing fabric to fight the soaring temperature in the hottest summer when temperature escalates up to 48 °C rather in summer another war is wagged between the designers launching heavily embellished expensive collections with foreign destination shoots. KWIC list of top 50 words include lawn, design*, collection*, embroidery*, store*, fashion, festive, luxe* but excludes comfort* and simple* that reflect the emerging discourse of luxury collection of heavily embroidered designer lawn. Verbal structure has been constructing a rhetoric in order to make a product more fashionable than it really is.