Ahlya Fateh is currently the Managing Director of Tata Naka, and was previously the managing editor of Tatler, the iconic British fashion magazine. With an impressive career spanning 13 years, Ahyla always knew publishing was where she wanted to be: “I’ve always loved magazines. I used to spend all my time reading them and I didn’t have posters of pop stars on my walls, I had Vogue covers.”
At Tatler she is responsible for the day-to-day running of the magazine – from organizing shoots to managing budgets and chasing copy. “I love watching the process of it all coming together over a one month period, then it’s time to move onto the next issue. There’s never time to get bored and the work is so diverse.”
A graduate of Modern Languages from Exeter University, Ahlya's first job was for PricewaterhouseCoopers where she cut her teeth in the business world before moving, in 1996, to Condé Nast. “I was lucky enough to join at a time the company was exploring new territories, such as Russia”, she explains. She worked on proving the viability of new titles by looking into circulation, advertising figures and exchange rates making her an expert in new launches. This knowledge, and her superior language skills (she speaks five languages including French and Russian), culminated in her secondment to Moscow as Editorial Business Director of Russian Vogue, an experience she likens to “being in Chicago at the time of Al Capone”.
She has held her current post at Tatler for eight years and is still loving it, describing herself as a “fashion geek” through and through. She was married, in 2002, to lawyer and restaurateur Ali Fateh and became the proud mother of two daughters – Sabrina Meher, born in 2004, and Lara Ayesha, born in 2007.
Ahlya was highly commended in the media category for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards in 2009 and was recently appointed by the ECB as a non-executive director to shape the marketing of the England Women’s Cricket Team. She says, “As a Pakistani, cricket is in my genes!”
