To start with, and on a very serious note, one must protest. There is no lighter side of fashion. Fashion is serious business. If you didn’t know that, you haven’t been listening to all the local fashion gurus … the business of fashion has been their mantra ever since the first fashion week in 2009 — though, as with all mantras, it seems to have had a hypnotic effect and appears, in most cases, to have put fashion to sleep. A scary case of eyes wide shut.

There is good taste, which, I guess, is good and then there is bad taste which is essential if you need something to laugh at while expressing outrage at the assault on your aesthetic sensibilities. Good or bad, it is an expression of who you are. The real problem is people with no taste; the hordes of beige ladies. It is like a sci-fi film on cloning gone horribly wrong. No individual style here, nothing to suggest that you can think beyond the billboard or magazine sending you that subliminal message telling you what to wear.

Preying on this sadly challenged and very large segment of society – the ones with no taste – it is all business and no fashion. It is no accident that the first living thing to be cloned was a sheep.

The business of fashion is more than economics. Its contribution to domestic and foreign policy cannot be underscored enough. In its fight against the Taliban, fashion has taken the war against terror to a runway near you. Tasked with filling the enemy with enough righteous indignation, the self-detonated fashionistas threw themselves into the challenge of redefining, and completely redesigning, the little black dress. It was a very serious mission, employing a not-so-unique strategy. In fact, this is something that has been done through the ages and had – until our design strategists reinvoked it – been considered somewhat outdated. It involved the use of that old combination of metres and metres of fabric and lots of exposed skin. It had after all worked well in the days of voluminous skirts and necklines that left the wearer in danger of exposure.

So our fearless warriors went to work, fighting terror and doing big business at the same time. Yards of fabric layered over each other, embellished and encrusted with all kinds of bling with an exposed shoulder on runways across the country. As images flashed across the Internet, the world sat up and took note of our best-kept secret and fashion became the weapon of choice. The voluminous robes designed to lure the enemy in to be finished off by the flash of skin hasn’t seemed to have had the desired effect. The mantra is tired, Vogue has done its story and despite valiant attempts to put a new spin on the old, it is just more of the same.

Can fashion still fight the Taliban or does it need to put in a little effort and win the more important fight against no taste first? Can truck art be finally put to bed with the ubiquitous crystal? And can we give all the folksy clothes and all those braids a rest? Our designers say the devil is in the detail but we all know the devil wears Prada.

Ayesha Tammy Haq is a talk show host, a columnist and a lawyer.