This London Fashion Week marks the fourth year of the International Fashion Showcase, the British Council and British Fashion Council’s initiative for emerging designers around the world. Per invitation from the BFC, over the four days of London shows, 130 carefully selected designers from 30 countries will get to present their collections at the Brewer Street Car Park for the press as well as the public.
The only vehicle of its kind (and magnitude, anyway), the IFS embodies a certain London fashion spirit that doesn’t really exist anywhere else in the international fashion landscape. It’s a helping hand for young designers from near and far, who wouldn’t necessarily get a chance to showcase their work to the industry and the world, and an opportunity for London Fashion Week to scout the diamond-in-the-rough designers, who have always been the driving force of London fashion.
What’s interesting about the International Fashion Showcase isn’t just the obvious stuff – finding new talent and a future for fashion – but the fact that the public gets to experience these talents in the raw and essentially judge for themselves before the designers are sent through the machinery of the fashion industry. For a business that’s often accused of exclusion and elitism, fashion’s introduction of the International Fashion Showcase is a rare chance for all fashion fans and followers to get a glimpse into the making of the designers, who eventually become trendsetters and shapers of culture. Moreover, it’s an opportunity to view fashion from every corner of the world on one, all-encompassing platform where each country’s cultural design differences get to stand out.
Historically an international hub for the import of just about everything, there’s something about London and its rich multi-cultural past that makes it a natural rallying point for the entrepreneurs of the world. As British as a lot of London fashion is, this fashion capital’s national pride has never stood in the way of designers from other nations, who’ve come here to create names for themselves and use London as a platform for building their brands. Perhaps it’s a hospitable mentality formed by our colonial legacy, or maybe it’s because London truly is a country within a country, much like those European mini states where everyone is an immigrant.
The International Fashion Showcase draws on this innate British need of ours to exhibit treasures from around the world in the museum we call London. In an almost Olympic fashion, we host designers from nations near and far, review them and promote them with the possibility that they’ll someday join the ranks of the many international designers, who have chosen London or London Fashion Week as their foundation for success. When we attend the shows of Erdem, Marques’Almeida, or Astrid Andersen, we don’t think of them as Canadian-born, Portuguese, or Danish. They’re just London designers.
Since our birth 35 years ago, i-D has been devoted to portraying and representing the youth cultures that could only ever have been generated by the unique openness so key to the London mindset. It’s a social spirit that welcomes just about all international influences with curiosity and excitement, igniting a willingness to explore and create, which has made London the world’s ultimate hotspot for multi-cultural youth culture for designers to draw on. It is with this in mind that we welcome global fashion talent to the International Fashion Showcase, in the hope that they will gain as much from London as London will gain from them.
Over the past years, much has been said about fashion week and its lack of public access. The fashion weeks of the world have had to recognise the public’s increasing interest in the shows, and the desire of non-industry members to experience fashion happening firsthand. While London shows such as Christopher Kane and Simone Rocha will hardly become open to the public in the near future, the International Fashion Showcase offers an open door to outside spectators, who don’t just want to look at fashion in a museum, but rather up close where it’s happening. In that sense, the initiative is the most open and inclusive vehicle in the industry, both when it comes to scouting designers and exhibiting their work.
But that isn’t the only side to the International Fashion Showcase. Once the 30 countries are lined up, a panel of judges selected by Sarah Mower MBE – Contributing Editor at American Vogue and the Ambassador for Emerging Talent at the British Fashion Council – will select a winning country, curator, and designer (respectively) and celebrate them at an awards ceremony on the Sunday of London Fashion Week. The awards mark the industry aspect of the International Fashion Showcase, and helps to define and narrow down the large number of participating countries and designers, effectively simplifying the platform to an industry and a public, who have already experienced it with their own eyes. It’s the root of the future of fashion, and a powerful convention of the fashion talent of the world.
The International Fashion Showcase is jointly organised by the British Council and British Fashion Council and is an annual international festival of emerging design talent. It’s open to the public from 20-24 February.
Catch up with the rest of our fall/winter 15 coverage here.
Credits
Text Anders Christian Madsen