Bad news from Brussels

For the past three days the Brussels Fashion Fair (BFF) has busily played host to a wide variety of fashion brands. The largely European contingency was enthusiastic and optimistic, despite negative sounds echoing from the press centre in the entrance hall during a presentation by Creamoda.

According to Creadmoda, the professional federation for the Belgian clothing industry, 2004 was a bad year for Belgian fashion. Local production declined, as did local investments and import and export. The trepidation with which local investments are approached can be explained by the uncertainty created by the abolishment of quotas per 1 January 2005.

Production is increasingly taking place abroad and Northern Africa finds itself having to make way for Asia. Particularly China is taking over as a global production centre, and not only for the Belgians.

Quite remarkable is the fact that the volumes of both import and export have climbed, while the value has continued to decline. Creamoda attributed this phenomenon to the decrease in prices of exported goods and the low labour costs of imported goods from Asia. Creamoda concluded that these developments will have negative consequences for the Belgian and European textile industry.

www.bff.be
25 January 2005

FashionFair Brussels growing success

The three-day Womens & Mens Wear fashion fair in Brussels has attracted 7.777 visitors this weekend. Belgian visitors represented 52% of the total but still the sentiment prevailed that the majority of visitors came from The Netherlands. This season WMW presented a new fair, namely ABE (Another Brand Exhibition presenting street- and club wear) that was successful but did not draw more people to the fair than usual.
At the fair over 376 labelled presented their new summer collections for 2004. FashionFair Brussels first started in the summer op 1997 with 70 labels present.

Brussels' success is also due to the hospitality of free entrance and the spectacular decoration of the fair floor. Large containers of bright green apples were available everywhere and funky house music jazzed up 4th Avenue with the younger jeans-, street- and sportswear collections.

The return of the eighties dominated the collections at WMW. A-line skirts, bright neon colours, netted shirts, cold-shoulder sweaters etc. They will all be back big time. Even more settled brands put out their own more subdued versions of these clothes that we'll surely see a lot of next summer.

July 31, 2003
www.bff.be