I came back this morning (while I’m writing it’s 10 PM on Monday, January 21st) from an exceptionally cold and snowy Paris, which hosted the thirteenth edition of “
Who’s Next“. Every tradeshow (this was the first of this magnitude in which I participated) leads me to make some more or less positive conclusions about the fashion industry. I chose to be honest when I spoke about
White Milano, so I will be on this occasion. The fashion world once again proved to be a bit closed and suspicious. Some aspects were against me, like the fact that tradeshows are primarily seen as an opportunity to sell and extend the network of business contacts, that the designers, except for the emerging, were hardly on the place, to give way to agents or sales managers, and that the fall/winter 2013 will be officially presented only in six months. Very few allowed me to take pictures, even when the interest was more in the stand set-up rather than in the collection itself, and very few were interested in the presence of the press. In the end I simply took note of the brands that interested me the most, and I decided to investigate and contact them in these days, in the hope that when they return, after the whole tradeshow frenzy finishes, we can create something interesting. Ideas were there, a little blurred by a crisis that forces us all to be more concrete, to bring down the costs and compromising with creativity, but were there. The undergrowth of emerging designers with fresh projects and with the ambition to create something new, was once again, for me, the driving force behind this event.