West Meets East on Hong Kong Runway
The runway at Hong Kong Fashion Week was as busy as the city’s international airport as the Jan. 18–21 event saw 25 fashion shows hit the catwalk, up from 14 last year.
There was a bit of something for everyone. One of the biggest draws was Vivienne Westwood’s first Hong Kong Fashion Week appearance, where the London house showed its diffusion label, Anglomania. Westwood was still in Milan for a show there, but her husband, Andreas Kronthaler, supervised the collection’s Hong Kong debut, which encompassed a kaleidoscope of fabrics and images that looked like an artist gone wild. Bright orange leggings with black designs highlighted a dress fashioned from fabric with a burst of bright orange flowers and white bees on a black background. A plain blue-and-white-striped shirt was adorned with an image of a Che Guevara look-alike and various sayings splashed across it.
Top regional designers Guo Pei, Dorian Ho, Toshikazu Iwaya and Frankie Xie were spotlighted.
Hong Kong designer William Tang made good use of the harem pant in knit outfits that looked stylish and comfortable. Indonesian designer Ali Charisma took his penchant for fancy dresses and played them up to the fullest with almost 90 looks that came waltzing down the runway.
Ika, another Indonesian designer now living in Hong Kong, cast her Fall/Winter 2010–2011 collection into a global-sphere theme, presenting nomadic looks with long tunics and skinny pants, blue- and purple-hued dresses for her Nordic Winter group, and a wide assortment of colors and prints for her Geo Swirl group. Ika blended as many as seven different fabrics into each look, culling them from the 150 different fabrics that went into this latest collection.—Deborah Belgum
