Why Umara and Kashaf refused to chase TikTok

A blog started at sixteen, with no strategy behind it

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming the sisters behind Umara and Kashaf, the fashion blog they started roughly five years before the recording. The first question is the obvious one: how did this begin? The answer is the opposite of a pitch deck. “As such usme koi itna strategic thought nahi tha, to be very honest,” Umara says. She had wanted to do fashion design, but her family, like many basic Pakistani families she describes, expected a doctor. She said yes to that path through O-levels and into FSc, then switched, applied for an international degree in fashion, found it was only offered as a diploma, and ended up in international relations on the advice of a senior who told her to pair it with politics.

Kashaf, four years younger, was sixteen at the time and joined the blog because the sisters did everything together. They went to the same school, the same college, the same university. “Jo mere teachers mujhe parhate the woh Kashaf ko Umara hi kehte the,” Umara says. The blog was not a business decision. It was an extension of the way two sisters already talked to each other.

Muzamil presses on the timing. Five years ago, the Pakistani Instagram blog was a magazine-style space where brands sent product and bloggers reposted on demand. Personal blogs barely existed. The sisters started at the moment that template was breaking, and the way they describe it, they were not aware of the template at all.

The blog is the lifestyle, not the extract from it

One of the sharper observations Umara makes about their own positioning comes when she contrasts how they grew with how others around them grew. “Logon ne apni lifestyle mein se apne blog ko extract kiya hai,” she says. “Humne apne blog ko apna lifestyle banaya.” The distinction is more than rhetorical. It explains why their output for a long time was two or three posts a month rather than thirty. School came first, parents were strict, going out was rationed against grades, and the blog had to fit inside that. The trade-off was depth: each post took longer, each one carried more of them.

It also explains why, even when paid placements were available, they declined the magazine-style brand pickups that were standard at the time. Muzamil presses on this directly, joking that money is hard to refuse at nineteen. Umara agrees, but says they held a line on what would and would not go up. The reason was not principled aesthetics; it was that they were already treating the blog as identity rather than inventory.

The judgement years, and a sister in her own world

When Instagram in Pakistan was still new, putting your face on it carried social cost. Muzamil asks about the judgement that came with early-mover visibility. Umara says the worst of it was over by the time the blog grew, because she had graduated and was insulated from a college environment. Kashaf, who was still in school, answers the question more interestingly. “I was in the world of my own,” she says. “Mujhe literally nahi hota tha ke what people are thinking.” Her friends, she adds, were supportive, partly because they had grown up alongside the blog and partly because the sisters’ growth at that stage was slow enough not to register as a status threat.

Muzamil notes the unusualness of this. Most early Pakistani creators, men and women, took some version of a social hit for being visible. The sisters seem to have moved through it by not noticing it. Some of that is temperament. Some of it, the conversation implies, is the protection of doing it together rather than alone.

Pakistani fashion has roots it has forgotten

The most substantial section of the conversation, in Muzamil’s own framing, is when he asks Umara for an elevator pitch of the blog. The answer is a thesis, not a tagline. The blog, she says, has always been about Pakistani fashion, specifically what an urban Pakistani girl should consider wearing. The framework she uses is historical. She points to pre-partition and early post-partition photographs of Fatima Jinnah and the women around her, who wore saris, ghararas, and shararas. “Woh sharara bhi pehenti thi, sari bhi pehenti thi,” she says, “which over the years humare culture se eradicate hua.” The argument is that what we now read as Indian dress was, in significant part, ours.

Muzamil pushes the point further. The reflexive nationalism that rejects shared subcontinental dress as foreign has, in his framing, been replaced by a different kind of import, an Arab aesthetic adopted more recently. He is careful not to call that bad, but he is clear that the absence of native rooting is a problem. Umara connects this to what she calls soft power, a term she picked up during her international relations degree. India’s fashion reach abroad, she argues, is downstream of Bollywood; the films humanised the country before the global brands followed. Pakistan, in her reading, has not done the equivalent work for itself, even though the underlying culture is rich and far more diverse than the popular framing of it suggests. Sindh, she points out, has its own sari tradition that does not register in the national conversation.

Why they refused to play the TikTok game

The longest argument of the episode is about TikTok, and it is the cleanest piece of business reasoning the sisters offer. When COVID lockdowns hit, the blog effectively stopped. They had relied on professional freelancers and had no in-house production skills. In a year when most other creators broke out, they made two videos.

When they came back, the brand briefs that landed in their inbox were already converging on a single format. “Brief aate hain usmein sabse pehle likha hota hai TikTok style video,” Umara says. They tried, and Umara was clear-eyed about why it failed. “Main jab TikTok jaakar kholti thi aur bachon ko dekhti thi itni smooth transition karte hue, I used to feel shame.” The thirteen and fourteen-year-olds on the platform were better at the form than she could become, and the form itself, she argues, has thin creative margin. To do it at all is to do roughly what everyone else is doing.

Instead, in January they pivoted to styling videos, a format adjacent enough to be commercially legible to brands but far enough from TikTok to let them keep an aesthetic. Muzamil pushes Kashaf on this, since she belongs to the generation that embraced TikTok. Her answer is the sharpest of the conversation. “TikTok didn’t align with our audience. So we understood it for the at the very starting point ke yeh cheez humare saath nahi chalegi.” The implication, which Muzamil draws out, is that a lot of younger creators currently confuse what is working on a platform with what could work for them. The sisters made the opposite call and were proven right by the styling videos that followed.

Umara adds a caveat she will not let herself off the hook on. They never fully tested TikTok with their own creative voice, she says. So she will not claim the format itself is unworkable. She will only claim it was not for them.

The platform incentivises imitation, not creativity

Muzamil offers his own framing on top of theirs, and it is one of the most concrete pieces of media analysis in the episode. Historically, he argues, platforms rewarded original creative work, which meant a small number of visionary people sat at the top. TikTok inverted that. It now rewards imitation, the reuse of a trending sound, dance, or transition. The benefit to the platform is democratisation: instead of ten people who can invent, you get a hundred and fifty who can replicate. The cost is that the creator economy stops selecting for originality and starts selecting for compliance.

Umara’s response is one Muzamil clearly registers. The pressure to produce thirty posts a month at the new pace, she says, is incompatible with the quality bar that defined their earlier work. “Humanly it is impossible ke tees ke tees post ki jo hai woh quality acchi ho.” The bottleneck, she suggests, is not creativity. It is throughput.

Corporate briefs have collapsed into TVCs with stickers

When the conversation turns to brand work and remuneration, Umara is sharper than the rest of the episode would suggest. Fashion campaigns, she says, still allow real creative margin; brands like Khaadi historically trusted the bloggers to interpret a collection. The corporate sector, which has been pulling creators into its budgets more recently, does the opposite. “Brand wants ke bas ab hamara sticker shuru mein lagayein, beach mein lagayein aur akhir mein lagayein and that’s it.” The work becomes a TVC running on a digital channel through an influencer’s face, with no native creative contribution from the creator at all.

The remuneration argument follows from this. Muzamil compares the maths plainly. A prime-time television show with two million views might earn a channel fifteen crore in associated revenue. A branded Instagram piece by a creator hitting comparable view counts earns a fraction of that. Umara confirms the gap without quoting numbers. She adds that, in her experience, the corporate-side rates have not meaningfully improved over time.

Muzamil’s broader complaint, which Umara backs, is that the Pakistani influencer market has lost the creative latitude that made the format interesting in the first place. The reason consumers find branded content annoying, in his reading, is that the brands have stopped letting creators be creators.

Identity, isolation, and why fashion creators do not collaborate

A smaller but recurring thread is the lack of collaboration in the Pakistani fashion-creator space. Muzamil contrasts it with YouTube, where Murree and similar creators routinely cross-pollinate. Umara is honest about the reasons. The sisters do not socialise much. Events that once made creators visible to each other have thinned out. Collaborations they have attempted have failed on scheduling. Kashaf adds an identity point: a viewer scrolling past a piece of content should be able to recognise the blog without needing to see the faces in it. Collaboration without that identity work risks blurring everyone into the same feed.

Muzamil agrees, and goes a step further. Each creator, he argues, is now a brand, and the brand has to be defended even when the platform is pulling for sameness. The way to collaborate without losing identity, he suggests, is to do it like fashion films, where each side contributes inside the other’s aesthetic. Whether that ever materialises in the Pakistani Instagram market is left open.

Thirty years from now, and who actually changes a country

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil shifts gears and asks the question he flags as the most important of the episode. By 2050, Umara will be fifty and Kashaf will be fifty-four. What does Pakistan look like then?

Umara’s answer rejects the casual register the country usually uses about itself. She wants to stay in Pakistan. She wants to import the better operating models she sees abroad rather than emigrate. And she is frustrated by the cycle in which the same arguments, about feminism, about violence against women, about who is allowed on the street, repeat every year with no resolution. The issue, in her reading, is not just the politicians. It is the public. “Hum log as a society generally blame karte hue nazar aate hain apne politicians ko, but mujhe lagta hai politician thode kaam hain. Hum log as a society bahut zyada hain.” If the audience held leaders accountable the way they hold creators accountable, she argues, the timelines would compress.

Kashaf adds a structural observation from her law studies. New social ideas in any legal system, she says, follow a fixed arc: conversation first, then uproar, then normalisation. Pakistan, in her reading, is in the middle phase. People are arguing now over what will be settled later. The implication is that the cultural floor is moving even when the policy ceiling is not.

Muzamil draws out the deeper point both sisters circle. The generation currently running the system grew up inside a Pakistan they were taught to read as a utopia, and the silences inside their households were part of how that reading was maintained. The current generation is rejecting those silences in public. When that generation reaches power, the country it inherits will be the one their refusal built.

Umara closes the political section with the line Muzamil seems to find most useful in the whole episode. Treating political loyalty like tribal affiliation, declaring oneself a noon league supporter or a PTI patwari for life, is the cap on the country’s ceiling. Every leader has strengths and weaknesses; demand the strengths and refuse the weaknesses, and the system has room to grow. Anchor to the party and the system collapses to its worst incumbent.

Muzamil closes the conversation by thanking Umara and Kashaf, apologising on behalf of his gender for the friction the sisters have had to navigate, and reframing the long argument of the episode in one line. It is not a men-versus-women fight, he says. It is a good-people-versus-bad-people one. The work of building the country the sisters described in 2050 belongs to anyone, regardless of gender, who is willing to do it.