Over five days in late October, designers, buyers and editors from across Asia gathered in Manila for the first edition of Fashion Week Asia, staged largely at the Palacio de Memoria, a restored 1930s mansion. The programme ran runway shows, forums, a showroom and a closing gala.
The showroom is the mechanism designed to close that gap. A runway produces images, and images do not pay for production, so the week was built with buyers in the room and a sales floor attached rather than added later.
The honest measure of success will not be coverage. It will be how many of those labels return next season with invoices, because a regional week either becomes a marketplace or it becomes a photograph of one.
Her diagnosis went further than visibility. What has been missing, she argued, is a connection to commerce, and the stated ambition is an end-to-end ecosystem rather than another circuit of shows.
