Veteran actress Asma Abbas has voiced concern about how much young people care about brand names.
In a recent interview, she said that she raised her children to value clothes for their quality and not for their labels, and that her family still shops at thrift stores.
Abbas said she watches the current generation, observing how they talk about their belongings. “They don’t say, ‘This is my bag, this is my purse.’ They say, ‘This is MK, mine is Tory Burch, mine is some other brand,'” she pointed out. “It has become so complicated that I wonder how these people will live like this.”
She gave socks as an example of how far the habit goes. “A pair of socks should show Nike written on it, or something else,” she said. “There has to be something, so people know whether it is Nike or whoever’s.”
Abbas said her own habits have not changed. “People like us still go shopping at Itwar Bazaar,” she said, referring to the weekly Sunday market. “We are still the same.”
She said her children have avoided the trend so far. “Alhamdulillah, this has not reached such a terrifying extent among my children,” she said. She credited the way she brought them up. “I raised them that way,” she remarked.
Abbas then described her own shopping. “We bought clothes from landa,” she recalled, using the word for second-hand clothing sold in bazaars. “We still buy them now. If I like something, I buy it.”
Abbas is a veteran Pakistani actress and the mother of actress Zara Noor Abbas.
She is also the sister of actress Bushra Ansari. She runs a clothing label called Asma Abbas Designs.
