What happened
: While international fashion weeks have gone fully digital with few physical runways, China’s domestic fashion weeks are blooming across the nation with extravagant offline ceremonies.
Although Shanghai Fashion Week and Beijing’s China Fashion Week have been leading the pack as platforms for local talents, Changshu International Fashion Week (Sept.20-22), Chongqing International Fashion Week (Sept. 16-21), and Shenzhen Original Design Fashion Week (Nov. 25-27) have each made a name for themselves with different focuses.
Changshu International Fashion Week (CIFW), which is organized by one of China’s largest apparel wholesalers Changshu Garments Town, “is focused on building sophisticated supply chain and logistics, whereas Shenzhen fashion week weighs more on tech,” according to Tera Feng, a Shanghai-based fashion buyer and stylist. This year marks her first-time judging the Fashion Combination Design Competition, which is part of the just-completed CIFW.
Jing Take#
: Many domestic fashion weeks, like the one in the textile-producing city of Changshu, have been running for nearly two decades. But this year, thanks to the strong government encouragement of domestic consumption and travel, these events have been given a new responsibility as a crucial part of the post-COVID-19 economy recovery.
In the case of Chongqing, a group of organizers that includes the China National Textile and Apparel Council and Chongqing district governments also aims to boost local tourism with their five-day event. The closing show was allocated to Wanzhou — one of Chongqing’s often overlooked districts with a population of 1.7 million.
The Jing Take reports on a piece of the leading news and presents our editorial team’s analysis of the key implications for the luxury industry. In the recurring column, we analyze everything from product drops and mergers to heated debate sprouting on Chinese social media.