Nasreen Askari

[6][circular reference] Nasreen Askari was born in Karachi in 1950, the youngest of six siblings, to parents who had migrated from India in 1946.

[citation needed] While in Tokyo, she added Japanese to her repertoire of languages which include Urdu, Gujarati and French in addition to English.

In 1997, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Pakistan, she was asked to co-curate the first ever exhibition on Pakistani costume and textiles in the United Kingdom.

The accompanying publication had two re-prints, was an Arts Book Club selection and is still in print, as the seminal work on the textiles of the country.

[10] The most significant aspect of this exhibition and the accompanying publication was, that for the first time, it identified textiles from the regions comprising Pakistan as being distinct from neighboring areas.

An important aspect of Nasreen Askari's books is that several of them are now accepted as the standard reference work on traditional Pakistani textiles.