Hong Kong Fashion Week - July 2006

I need to catch up on some past events before I head out into what is going to be happening over the next couple of months. A matter of 6 weeks or so ago we attended the Hong Kong Fashion Festival held at the Hong Kong Conference centre. The July show is regrettably not as big as the show in January however it no less interesting for a multitude of reasons.

Hong Kong people handle their visiting media quite differently to other venues around Asia, in some ways it was okay, in others there is a lot of room for improvement (if you guys out there organising are taking notice).

The venue layout was a large improvement on the difficult arrangement they had last January. I say difficult from the point of view as a photographer because back then the line that the models took made it hard to get the "shot" that we slaves on the riser aim for.

What they made up for in layout, they lost out with the lighting at times. Depending on how many shots and the speed which you want to shoot them at, the lighting was not always uniform and for a few of the shows was shifting 2 to 3 f-stops as the models walked towards us. As such the poor old Canon had a hard time trying to keep up, often missing out on changing the exposure settings between frames. Bear in mind I can take up to 500 or 1000 photos in one show of 20 minutes so it puts a lot of stress on the camera if every shot needs a new setting.

Besides those problems, the show was typically well organised and provided us with the resources we needed with a good media room that enabled us to get out photos up earlier than we might have done otherwise. This time we had all the collections posted on the net almost as soon as the last show was finished.

The number of photographers changed daily, a lot more turned up for the Korean designer shows supplying to the Korean magazines while the usual suspects that will be found at each event always there.

A lot of designers from around Asia did not take part in the shows themselves however they had put together booths in the trade centres. We managed to catch up with Ika and Muji Ananta in a few spare minutes we had to walk around the displays. As to be expected, Ika put on great show introducing Hong Kong designer Peter Lau in what might have been his modelling debut. Ika tells me he was under great stress before the show.