It’s Fashion Week. Who cares?
If we’re being honest… still not a lot of antipodians, who find fashion elitist and wanky, jarring with our collective sense of our laid-back Down Under-ness. Notable among the naysayers: many legacy media folk who continue to struggle to see the industry’s relevance as a legitimate news subject. This in spite of the facts that fashion is a US$3 trillion global industry, that luxury brands have colonised prime retail locations in Auckland and every major Australian city – with queues of customers frequently seen stretching down the street outside boutiques waiting to be let in – and that some fashion story or other manages to blow up the global news cycle almost every week. A few recent cases in point, Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans ad kerfuffle and Volodymyr Zelensky’s “fabulous” suit that upstaged the primary coverage of the White House Ukraine-Russia peace summit. Let’s face it, the world cannot get enough of fashion.
Yes the needle has moved – somewhat – since Australian Fashion Week found itself in the crosshairs of the ABC watchdog Media Watch back in 2000 when host Paul Barry ripped into Australian newspapers for foregoing fashion’s usual home – the ghetto of the lifestyle pages (not that long ago referred to as the “women’s” pages) – with coverage of the country’s biggest frockfest cannibalising sacred early general news real estate. “Fashion pretending to be news” sniffed Barry in the May 14 2000 episode, a few days after the fifth iteration of the event, which was at the time still in its infancy. “Now the girls are lovely, and we’re all so proud that our designers are taking the world by storm (does anyone believe that?)” he added, “But is this really front page news at the serious end of town?”
Twenty-five years later one of the brands on high rotation on AFW’s early runways – Zimmermann – now boasts over 60 stores worldwide and a market valuation of AUD 1.75billion as of 2023, when US-headquartered global private equity firm Advent International acquired a majority stake. Co-founders Nicky and Simone Zimmermann are among a growing cohort of homegrown fashion moguls, who include the founders of White Fox and Meshki, now snapping up eight figure trophy homes in and around Sydney Harbour. The entire Australian industry, meanwhile, has been independently audited by a ‘serious end of town’ analyst [Ernst & Young] on behalf of the Australian Fashion Council and was found to have contributed over AUD 27.2billion to the Australian economy in 2021, generating AUD 7.2 billion in export revenue, representing 1.7 percent of all Australian exports – more than double the value of Australia’s wine and beer exports. According to a separate EY report, this time commissioned by Mindful Fashion, the New Zealand clothing and textile industry was worth NZ 7.8billion to the New Zealand economy in 2023, representing 1.9 percent of New Zealand’s GDP.
What role, if any, did fashion weeks play in all this? At the very least they provided a centralised platform for the promotion of Australasian fashion designers and an entry level springboard for emerging talents and proactively imported prominent international buyers and media, setting the wheels in motion for some of this region’s greatest fashion success stories. The NSW Government now wants to drill down a little further than anecdotal evidence on this. On Thursday it unveiled the NSW Fashion Sector Strategy 2025-2028, an initiative – the first of its kind in Australia – to support and develop an industry that’s worth more than AUD9.7billion to the state economy, according to EY. Targets include growing local and international markets and establishing and extending pathways for emerging designers, with AFW flagged as one of six key strategic priorities. Brand sales and export revenues directly attributable to the event are amongst the KPI’s to be measured.
Zimmermann had been selling its fashion collections for five years when it debuted a swimwear capsule at the inaugural AFW in 1996 in a deliberate bid to whet the appetite of international buyers. This kicked off their export business, which led to the opening of their first international stores and their 2013 relocation to New York Fashion Week. In 2022 Zimmermann decamped to the Paris Fashion Week schedule. Earlier this year the company purchased an entire building in Le Marais to house its burgeoning European headquarters, with some industry insiders predicting it could be a AUD 5billion brand before long.
With NZFW not launching until 2001, Zambesi, Wallace Rose, World and Moontide swimwear showed at AFW in 1997, assisted by Trade New Zealand. In 1998 they were joined in Sydney by Nicholas Blanchet, Kate Sylvester, Karen Walker and Workshop. In 1999 Walker, Zambesi, NOM*d and World showed on schedule at London Fashion Week, promoted as the New Zealand Four and sponsored by Trade New Zealand, Brand New Zealand and Wools of New Zealand. Walker went on to build a global brand, showing in London for eight seasons, before moving on to New York Fashion Week, where she showed for a decade. Rising star Rory William Docherty is the latest Kiwi to try their luck on the international stage, foregoing the 2025 event to make his London Fashion Week debut on September 22.
The value of all that fashion week media exposure that once irked Paul Barry? In November 2022 AFW’s former operator IMG released a report commissioned from American data and technology company Launchmetrics which determined that the 2022 event had generated USD $9.8million in what Launchmetrics calls Media Impact Value [MIV] across 40 markets. Established designers generated three times more coverage and emerging designers, 12-fold more coverage, during the month of the event compared to any other month of the year or compared to showing off-calendar anywhere else within the same month, the report added. Irrespective of the hype, Afterpay ultimately withdrew its sponsorship of the event in 2023 and IMG pulled the plug on AFW in November 2024, handing the reins over to the AFC.
No serious media outlet would surely question the relevance to the French of Paris Fashion Week, an event that was first formally organised back in 1868 and whose Fall 2025 season earlier this year generated over one billion New Zealand dollars in MIV [US$727million] according to Launchmetrics, almost double that of the next biggest leg of the season in Milan [US$378.9million]. The Paris shows [two ready-to-wear women’s, two RTW men’s and two haute couture] are key components of a publicity machine that helps drives a fashion sector that was France’s top export earner of 2021, accounting for 600,000 jobs, President Emmanuel Macron told reporters in January 2022 during the opening of Chanel’s 19M craftsmanship hub just outside Paris. According to the 2024 Global Luxury Market Report published by American media company and luxury analyst Luxonomy, in 2024 the luxury industry overall accounted for more than 4 percent of France’s GDP, equivalent to around €120 billion, representing the largest tranche – 29.6percent – of the €390billion global [personal luxury goods] market. France’s specialist craftsmanship sector alone – according to a 2024 report published by The Institut pour les Savoir-Faire Français and market research firm Xerfi Specific – generated combined revenues of €68 billion in 2022, more than the pharmaceutical industry.
But the luxury sector is in crisis right now, facing serious economic headwinds, with sales and profit declines across the board. This has led to an unprecedented turnover of C-Suite executives and creative directors at the world’s biggest brands, as luxury conglomerates clear the decks and strategise how to energise their product offerings and entice consumers back into their stores.
NZFW: Kahuria 2025 kicks off on the eve of the Spring 2026 women’s RTW show season which will see creative director debuts unveiled at a swag of major names from Dior to Chanel, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Jean Paul Gaultier and Gucci. The care factor surrounding this particular show season? Off the charts – if Jonathan Anderson’s internet-breaking debut menswear show for Dior in July was any indication [generating one billion views across Dior’s social media platforms alone, the company reported]. As top Paris-based luxury headhunter Floriane de Saint Pierre recently told WWD, “Coming fashion weeks will mark history”.
