Hosted by the world’s most populous country, China Fashion Week is a center for both avant-garde and timeless works of fashion in both clothing design and make-up styling. China Fashion Week is generally held in October or November to showcase design collections for the spring and summer and is held in March and April to showcase design collections for the fall and winter. A variety of different design styles are easily evident and clothing collections are made up of men’s apparel, women’s apparel, children’s apparel, intimate apparel and wedding gowns. There is generally a combination of everyday design lines and haute couture, which is displayed only by professionals or very accomplished students of fashion design. There are always a few fashion design contests made up of graduate students at the world’s leading fashion programs, and the prizes are usually a considerable sum of money and a contract with a more well-known leader of the fashion world.
The 2010 China Fashion Week held in October and November played host to thirty very famous fashion designers and over a hundred new designers, as well as make-up and hair stylists, which are seen to be equally as important a part of China Fashion Week as the clothing itself. The 2010 show displayed over fifty different clothing brands from twenty different countries, twenty-five of which were strictly haute couture, making this show the third largest demonstration of haute couture fashion behind the fashion weeks of Paris and New York, respectively. Having just celebrated its thirteenth year in existence, China’s extravagant gathering of designers, models, manufacturers, press and intellectuals is gaining popularity remarkably fast and has become a considerable contender in the field of haute couture fashion galas.
A number of the models along the runway are Chinese, as are a fair amount of the fashions themselves, many of them playing off of the nation’s deep-set love of certain shapes, colors, styles and motifs. There are, however, models from all over the world and many of the models walking the catwalk in Beijing have also done so in the fashion celebrations seen in Paris and New York. Most patrons of the week’s events are related to the fashion industry, either as press reporters or photographers or as designers, models or manufacturers themselves. Fashion week is not just for the design-minded, though; the 2010 event held fourteen press conferences and nine professional lectures on style and art inspired by the designs seen throughout the week. Like other famous fashion weeks, the one held in China is “the place to be” during that time period, offering spectacle for a variety of celebrities and major players in the fashion world. Although the importance of the fashion itself is not to be overlooked, China Fashion Week also plays a crucial role in bringing together the developing minds of the design universe.