The 2017 Shishi Fashion Week opened in Shishi, in southeast China’s Fujian province, on April 24. The four-day event included nearly 20 fashion shows at two venues — Shishi Garment City and Shimao Skyscraper City.
Shishi city, which is best-known for its casual wear, is one of the hotbeds of China’s fashion industry. With a strong and ever-expanding garment industry, the city has cultivated a number of award-winning designers, including winners of the Golden Thimble Award, China’s top prize for garment design. Designers Yang Ziming, Chen Wen, Ji Wenbo, Zeng Fengfei and Liu Yong presented their latest designs at theis year’s fashion week.
China’s Top 10 Outstanding Designers — Yang Zi, Hong Meixuan, Hui Wenlong and Hao Jia — also have their careers marked with the name of Shishi. Yang Zi and another two China’s top 10 — Duanmu Wen and Liu Yiqun — prepared runway shows for Shishi fashion week.
Golden Thimble Award-winner Chen Wen brought the latest trends in denim clothing, along with three young designers from the Shishi fashion designers association.
Duanmu Wen staged his newest interpretations of new Chinese-style outfits. Duanmu was part of the designers’ team which created the new Chinese-style outfits for the 2014 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Since then he has been dedicated to the revival of traditional Chinese clothing in the contemporary era.
The closing show by Hong Kong-based designer Yang Zi combined Shishi-produced smart fabrics, textile printing technology and wearable devices, pointing to the new direction of fashion design.
Besides exhibiting the works of accomplished fashion designers, the fashion week attached greater importance to discovering the work of promising new designers, including Shishi native Wu Huanran’s ready-to-wear garments and Xu Xinyin’s family look.
Italian brand Nogara was invited to present its glamorous haute couture styles.
Besides staging dazzling runway shows, the fashion week also facilitated business matching between designers, producers and buyers, by introducing three industrial platforms — fashion industry portal Diction, independent designers’ network Weran Fashion and multinational company Apple Group, which incorporates brand operation, production, marketing and franchising.
Diction provides online services for the fashion industry by connecting 500 designers and buyers across the world and working with the International Commission for Color in Fashion and Textiles and La Chambre Syndicale de la Couture. It sponsored several emerging designers’ runway shows during fashion week, and helped designers build up cooperation channels at matchmaking events following the runway parades. Through the Diction Mall designers’ original creations were made accessible to distributors and buyers.
Weran Fashion is a platform that gathers not only fashion designers, but also illustrators, jewelry and doll designers. It enables designers to focus on the creative process by releasing them from the task of finding buyers. Weran Fashion brought Shen Shengzhe’s Hulun, a brand favored by popular actresses such as Zhao Liying and Amber Kuo Tsai-chieh, and France-based Chinese designer Gao Wei’s GWcouture.
Apple (China) Co, a subsidiary of Apple Group, staged Shi Shengjie’s designs, which blend technology with fashion.
All three platforms signed cooperation agreements with the fashion week to ensure long-term, mutually beneficial developments.
