Pakistani couturier Parishae Adnan closed Flying Solo’s New York Fashion Week show this week with Second Skin, an eight look sustainable couture collection built almost entirely from garments that had already lived a previous life, marking one of the more striking Pakistani presences on the global fashion calendar this season and offering a rare instance of a South Asian design house closing out a major international showcase rather than simply appearing within it.

The collection was constructed from archival menswear, bridalwear pulled from the house’s own history, and deadstock fabric left over from earlier seasons, all dismantled and reconstructed around the female body through tailoring, corsetry and hand embroidery. Rather than introducing new material, Adnan worked almost entirely with what already existed within the house’s archive, turning garments originally designed for one purpose into pieces that carry an entirely different silhouette and meaning. That approach places Second Skin squarely within the broader conversation happening across the global fashion industry right now around sustainability, circularity and the environmental cost of constantly producing new fabric, a conversation in which Pakistani design houses have historically had a limited visible presence on runways as prominent as New York’s.

Second Skin moves in one deliberate arc across its eight looks. It opens with the rigid codes of traditional menswear, strong shoulders, precise tailoring and a tie, before pushing steadily toward corsetry, exposed construction and exaggerated volume, and closing on a look built almost entirely from sweeping tulle. Nothing in the collection functions as a straightforward revival of past pieces. A menswear waistcoat that had appeared on a runway in December 2024, for instance, is pulled inward to fit a female torso, with its darts and pleats forced outward into visible ridges rather than hidden away in the lining, so that the construction of the garment becomes part of its visual statement rather than something concealed beneath the surface. This decision to expose rather than disguise the mechanics of tailoring runs through much of the collection, functioning almost as a signature technique that distinguishes Adnan’s reworking of archival pieces from more conventional upcycling, which tends to disguise a garment’s earlier life rather than foreground it.

There is also a personal thread running through the collection’s craft story, one that gives Second Skin a weight beyond its technical execution. Look one, titled My Father’s Tie, is built around a hand embroidered raw silk tie originally created for a 2001 collection by Adnan’s father, the designer Amir Adnan, whose work is widely credited with modernising Pakistani formalwear over more than three decades and who built the House of Amir Adnan into one of the country’s most recognised fashion labels after leaving a career in banking to pursue design full time in the late 1980s. The tie now sits on a jacket cut into a severe, exaggerated hourglass shape, carrying a masculine object across two decades into a silhouette it was never originally made for, a small but pointed gesture that runs through much of Adnan’s design language and that speaks directly to the collection’s larger theme of inheritance being something that is actively reshaped rather than passively received.

Elsewhere in the collection, the same instinct is applied to material rather than memory. A bridal lehenga from an earlier bridal presentation is recut into a sculpted bustier paired with a sixteen inch mini skirt, while an unsold sherwani, left sitting in the house’s deadstock for more than fifteen years, is transformed into a cropped suede jacket. Both pieces illustrate a working method built around excavation rather than acquisition, treating the house’s own decades deep archive as a raw material source in its own right, a resource most fashion houses accumulate but rarely mine so deliberately for an entirely new collection.

The show marks a significant milestone in Adnan’s own trajectory within the House of Amir Adnan. She currently serves as CEO of Shapar Private Limited, which operates the House of Amir Adnan alongside FnkAsia and Craft Stories, and is recognised as the first woman in Pakistan’s fashion history to lead a major house handed down from its founding generation. Her path to that role included a period spent in consulting before she chose to step away and take up leadership of her father’s fashion legacy, a decision she has described as one that mattered more to her than her own individual career ambitions at the time. She has also spoken about adopting a tailored, structured approach to leadership as she navigated professional spaces that often read her as a woman first and a leader second, an experience that appears to echo through the way Second Skin repeatedly reworks traditionally masculine tailoring codes into womenswear, turning what was initially a personal negotiation of professional identity into a recurring visual language across her collections.

Beyond her role at the House of Amir Adnan, Adnan also runs House of Parishae, her own personal label, giving her a parallel space to explore design ideas outside the family house’s core identity even as she continues to expand its footprint internationally, including into North America and Canada, markets her father has said the house has been actively working to build inroads into over recent years. That dual track, running an independent label alongside stewardship of a legacy house, has become a defining feature of how she has approached her career, allowing her to experiment more freely under her own name while maintaining continuity and discipline within the family business.

Second Skin also arrives at a moment when House of Amir Adnan has been increasingly visible for bold, boundary pushing presentations under Adnan’s direction, following collections such as Nakhlistan, which similarly demonstrated her willingness to depart from safer, more conventional interpretations of her father’s design legacy in favour of pieces that actively argue with tradition rather than simply preserving it.

For Pakistani fashion, Second Skin’s placement as the closing show of Flying Solo’s New York Fashion Week lineup adds to a growing pattern of Pakistani designers finding a footing on major international runways, a development that carries significance well beyond a single collection given how limited that presence has historically been. The collection’s central idea, that a garment’s past life can be physically carried into its next one, gives the collaboration between father and daughter a resonance that goes well beyond a single season’s design language, positioning it as much as a statement about legacy and reinvention as it is about sustainability in the narrower, more technical sense the fashion industry usually applies to that word.

Compiled by the Weekly PK Culture Desk.