Global : Survival Of The Fittest For Fashion Weeks Organizers

Forget hemlines and hipsters; the latest international fashion craze is for Fashion Weeks. Australia, examined on the opposite page, is just one of many. Besides Sydney and the Big Four (London, Paris, Milan and New York) there are, for example, Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul, all of which are planning on linking up, à la Europe, in an Asian Fashion Federation.

Then there's Toronto, Turkey, Singapore, India - whose FW alternates between Delhi and Bombay - Buenos Aires and Beirut, not to mention Hong Kong, New Zealand, Moscow and Sa~o Paulo. There are so many fashion weeks, in fact, and so many of them have sprouted up so recently (most are under a decade old) that last month the Shanghai Garment Trade Association held a conference to discuss creating an "International City Fashion Federation".

It's a veritable fashion week free-for-all, and it's all down to two relatively new, and significant, developments.

First, the agreement among members of the World Trade Organization that by 2005 the garment-export quotas the west has historically imposed on made-in-China clothes will be lifted - a deal that will probably see China becoming responsible for at least half of the world's garment exports, and a number of smaller countries, whose garment industries currently exist because of the China restrictions, losing those industries entirely.

"How do you compete with a country like China?" asks Roger Tredre, the editor-in-chief of Worth Global Style Network, an internet fashion newspaper. "Well, one way is to push your image as a design capital." If South Korea, say, can convince the rest of the world that while it may be more expensive to produce garments there, the extra investment is offset by local style awareness, it may be able to save its garment workers yet.

Then there is the ego factor - the belief that fashion somehow indicates a certain maturity in the life of a country. "Fashion is increasingly a sign of a country's cultural sophistication," says Tredre. "In the 19th century every great city had to have an opera house; in the 21st, they all want a modern art gallery and a fashion week." Fashion, after all, works as a kind of virtual aesthetic ambassador.

The problem is that while more and more countries want a fashion week, the fashion world does not particularly want the fashion weeks of more and more countries. At this point a buyer could spend her year globetrotting from one set of shows to the other, but there wouldn't be room in her store for all her wares. And in truth, most of the burgeoning fashion weeks will probably remain either local or hemispheric events, as opposed to must-go dates on the international fashion calendar.

Ultimately, it will be a case of survival of the fittest. Literally.