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Fashion in Singapore

Not the cars...

Lately I was made to do a research on Fashion in Singapore and I made loads of interesting discoveries about the fashion industry in Singapore that most girls plainly keen on shopping might not even know. It is interesting to note that our government agencies are very keen on developing the Singpore Fashion sector actually and has put in substantial efforts in helping to raise the profiles of some Singapore-based designers and highlight the achievements of some foreign-based Singaporean designers.

Some of my findings included the fact that RAOUL is a Singapore label, by F J Benjamin; alldressedup is a label also home-grown and by The Link. Many didn't seem to realise that these are Singapore brands until perhaps they heard our finance minister praising them last year. One of the important designers for alldressedup is Sven Tan, a up-and-coming Singaporean designer. Then I found out about Jo Soh and her label 'hansel', with very interesting designs. I also think it is important that I remind everyone that Charles & Keith is from Singapore. I must highlight these brands because they are rather high profile and have caught attention of people of high fashion world like those in Europe and also United States.

I discovered some other brands which appear to be established in some other nearby markets like Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand. They are names like bYSI, which I didn't know was Singapore-based, and IORA, which I used to think was a little auntie-ish. It looks pretty good nowadays. In my research I learnt more about the Singapore Fashion Festival, an event whose existence wasn't knowledge to me until I embarked on this research and I got to know that IE Singapore, STB and SPRING Singapore and TaFf is behind the upcoming Asian Fashion Exchange. This particular thing covers the Audi Fashion Festival, Blueprint Trade Show and some fashion design competition.

In fact, my research led me to some other side stuff about design as well; because I was looking up on Andrew Gn, who is a Singaporean designer based in Paris, I found out about this President Design Award. Andrew Gn won the designer of the year for one of the past years. All these research was to prepare for a presentation and while eventually not all the information and knowledge was used, I guess I benefitted immensely from knowing all these details because they made me somewhat conversant about the industry in Singapore even though I might not exactly be appreciative of specific designs or the quality of those labels.