Fashion Week Showcases Creative Excellence

Air New Zealand Fashion Week Showcases New Zealand Creative Excellence

28 June 2004 -- New Zealand Trade and Enterprise Director Creative Industries Dame Cheryll Sotheran, welcomed the launch of Air New Zealand Fashion Week (ANZFW) 2004, saying the event is a unique opportunity to brand New Zealand internationally as a hotbed of creative excellence.

“We congratulate founder Pieter Stewart for her entrepreneurial drive and commitment to New Zealand fashion. Air New Zealand Fashion Week will highlight New Zealand’s distinctive fashion brands and showcase New Zealand design and innovation to an influential audience of international media and buyers.

“The event illustrates the success of our creative industries and allows New Zealand to position itself as a confident nation of talented people and ideas, while supporting export growth and global linkages for companies in the fashion sector,” says Dame Cheryll. Fashion Week founder and managing director Pieter Stewart, says she is delighted at NZTE’s involvement as the event’s strategic partner. “NZTE and its predecessor organisations have been supportive partners of the event. Their global reach and onground expertise has been extremely beneficial for us and for designers involved in the event and NZTE are already busy establishing international contacts for this year’s event. We look forward to an exciting event this year – one that benefits fashion and the wider creative industries and firmly establishes New Zealand as source of new thinking and visionary design.”

Fashion Week generated over $12 million in international media coverage in 2003 and involved 50 designer labels and over 200 international buyers and media from 12 countries. New Zealand’s wider apparel industry exports over $492 million of products to the world, including high-fashion, textiles and accessories.

Dame Cheryll says that New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) support for the event is a key part of its strategy to help grow the creative industries and change perceptions about New Zealand abroad.

“Governments around the Asia-Pacific region – in Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong – are all supporting fashion weeks. They see these events as high-profile branding opportunities for their country and work to leverage events and focus international attention on their successes,” says Dame Cheryll.

“In a global economy dominated by brands, New Zealand’s creative industries – from fashion to film, design and music – all play a major part in raising New Zealand’s visibility. This makes our fashion designers ambassadors for New Zealand on the world stage. Having consumers overseas wearing New Zealand labels, seeing influential media, buyers, even celebrities talking about our designers, is the sort of endorsement that makes New Zealand a talking point and has positive spillovers for all our exports.”

www.nzfashionweek.com www.nzte.govt.nz/creative

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