Fiji Fashion Week to feature designers from 10 Pacific Islands

As part of its tenth anniversary milestone celebrations this year, the Fiji Fashion Week will feature designers from 10 Pacific Island countries alongside Fiji’s own designers.

The Pacific Islands’ leading fashion event will be held this year between May 22 and 27 in Suva with a series of associated events held in and around Fiji’s capital city. The main week’s programme will open with the first ever Pacific Island Resort Show that will feature the ten Pacific Island designers.

“Whilst still in its early stages, we have secured a great line-up of emerging and established designers coming from Samoa, Cook Islands, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia and more,” Fiji Fashion Week Managing Director Ellen Whippy-Knight said.

The 2017 programme, however, will begin as early as next week, on 25 March, with the Miss Teen Model Competition that will select a new model to be the face of the event, and close with the Gold Couture Show as the grand finale of established designers on Saturday 27 May.

“We have had so many successes in developing designers and the industry within Fiji and the Pacific that we have decide to celebrate these achievements by theming our event this year with the colour gold,” Ms Whippy-Knight said. “Gold represents many emotions, passion, courage, love and compassion, and it is also evoking sparkle, glitz and glamour – it’s the perfect combination as the theme for Fiji Fashion Week 2017.”

Fiji Fashion Week is making a conscious decision to include the broader community in its events this year and has several new initiatives in place to bring Fashion off the runway and into everyday lives, Ms Whippy-Knight said.

Some of the events in the month leading up to fashion shows will be the ‘Fashion Retailers Best Dressed Shop Window Competition’; a photography exhibition of the history of Fiji Fashion Week; and the ‘Most Fashionable Office Staff Photo Competition’ with a prize of 10 tickets to attend one night at Fiji Fashion Week.

Also in the programme is a one-day Fashion Symposium ‘The Business of Fashion’, where Paul Rider, a Professor of Fashion from the Royal College of Arts, UK, will deliver the keynote address. Local emerging and established designers as well as Fijian expatriate designers will be featured in the ‘Trendsetters and Gold Couture Show’.

The programme includes a focus on the fastest growing segment of Fiji Fashion Week, the Children’s Designer Shows, with a linked seminar that has attracted 500 students and teachers, the largest number yet, according to Ms Whippy-Knight. The Designer Awards for 2017 will also be announced at the event.

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   Source: Pacificperiscope