The Australian Fashion Council (AFC) has a lot to do between now and May 2025 if it hopes to bring a world-class fashion industry event to life.
So far, it’s got the backing from Destination NSW - a key sponsor - and it’s locked in Carriageworks as the prime event location.
The immediate next step is filling out a dream team to ideate and execute the Fashion Week 2025 agenda, starting with the hunt for a partnerships manager. From there, it’s pretty much starting from scratch on everything - including the launch of a new website and its own social media channels.
That’s a tough gig considering that IMG still owns the AFW website and several social media pages across LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and others. All of which are still currently live, albeit not active.
But AFC CEO Jaana Quaintance-James says the council already has a great starting point. That’s over 260 business members signed on to the AFC and over 60 years of experience leading the fashion and textile industry.
“We should think about 2025 as a step change,” Quaintance-James said, “because we've got a short amount of time.
“What we're focused on is making that very successful and then the world is our oyster. There's lots of big ideas about what we can do in subsequent years as well.”
The securing of a partnership manager is essential, as AFW 2025 requires more corporate partnerships and sponsors to fund the event.
Then there’s the designer participation program. “So figuring out exactly the structures through which designers participate, what the criteria is, and then obviously doing the outreach and formalizing their engagement, and then moving into the practicalities of production and so forth,” the AFC boss says.
“We're going to have the on-site show component and an off-site show component. We've got a lot of information now about different locations off site that designers can potentially leverage, which really showcase Sydney.”
Most important of all is considering how to attract international and local buyers from leading fashion retailers. International buyers are key for 2025 as these were down in 2024, which the former IMG APAC managing director Natalie Xenita confirmed in an exclusive interview with Ragtrader a few months ago.
Much of this decline, according to Xenita, was due to global economic challenges alongside Australia being a waterlocked country far from major international markets such as Europe and the USA.
Quaintance-James says the utmost priority for 2025 is rebuilding the trust from the industry into Australian Fashion Week going forward. Part of this involves establishing an ecosystem to help emerging fashion labels grow, while also allowing the industry event to evolve. According to the AFC boss, there appeared to be a lack of renewal in recent AFW events.
“The newest brands - even from the Next Gen and the student-related style shows - those are ultimately the incubators for what will be the future Zimmermann,” Quaintance-James says.
“So it's about thinking of this as an ecosystem.”
Quaintance-James says the focus will be on driving emerging labels through group shows into solo shows - almost like a levelling up.
“I think that what was really clear from the industry engagement in the past few weeks is that different brands are there for different reasons. For some, it is really important about the media and the PR and the brand positioning. For others, it's really about the international buyers and getting access that is just practically difficult to achieve from an investment perspective. So we have to deliver to both of those things.”
And then there’s the role for Fashion Week to play for the well-established brands, and this is one key reason why Quaintance-James says that AFW needs to rebuild trust from the industry, in order to bring back the success stories.
“It's also doing things like reshaping the framework for how people participate, to make sure that whilst the event is successful in covering its own costs, it also creates freedoms for brands to show up creatively in the way that they want to and access their own partnerships.”
Quaintance-James says that while the AFC will lead the event formation, they won’t be doing it alone.
“This is industry driven, and we need everyone to get in and make this really successful. There is a lot of opportunity to leverage the networks of our members and non-members to really drive that outcome as well.”