Amatas Runway Photographer

Busy Week in Kuala Lumpur

2006-11-28T16:36:00.000-08:00

Tangoo

Malaysian - International Fashion Week 2006, a new title for what was once Kuala Lumpur Asian Fashion Week has finished again for another year. As a welcome relief, this year it was all held at the one venue, the KL Convention Centre so no more running from one side of the twin towers to the other. The festival has taken on a new impetus perhaps driven in some way by the loss of one of its major backors, Mercedes Benz. I want to discuss this loss to the fashion industry so will try to find out more if possible and will look to the Amatas forum for comments from anyone who knows more about what they are planning.

The week started off with a private showing by Bernard Chandran where he has opened his latest store at KL Plaza. Marred in some way by the lack of good lighting, the collection itself
showed his considerable talent as one of Malaysia's foremost designers.

The rest of the show had been divided over 4 days that gave a great coverage of all that Malaysia has to offer.

Day 1. The day was kicked off early in the morning by the collections of the Padini Group of labels followed by Albert King that featured (as did a number of the other shows) shoes by Lewre that had been designed using Swarovski jewelry. This was followed by a show by Carven Ong with his "Sense" collection. Next was the quirky "Post-apocalyptic" collection by Cris Yong that was follwed by the Marks and Spencer range.

The evening saw amongst others the fabulous collections of Melinda Looi pictured above with yours truly as one of the KL 6 as they are being promoted internationally. This show also included Edmund Ser, Eric Choong, Michael Ong, Sonny San and the doyen of Malaysian fashion, Tom Abang Saufi.

Day 2. Respectably the day started in the afternoon with the Mens wear with several designers including Edmund Ser and William Liew. That was followed by shows by Frank Lai and Tangoo. later shows had a collection of wedding gowns from several designers and then an evening show for Corus watches.

Day 3. The morning held a workshop on Malaysian craft and then a full afternoon with 14 designers from the Islamic Fashion Festival showing off their collections.

Day 4, the last day started off with collections from 4 up and coming designers follwoed by the Villiam Ooi collection and then another group show.

The evening had an early show featuring Kraftangan Malaysia atended by HRH the Queen. Famous shoe designer to the stars Jimmy Choo was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Minisiter for Culture Hertiage and the Arts.

The last show for the day was presented by Mercedes and had 8 young designers vying for their fashion awards.

All in all a busy week. We have all the shows featured on the website and I invite you to take a look.

Take some time out and join the Amatas Fashion Forum and give your comments on the various collections. We might even be able to get the designers to give their responses if you are polite.

The State of Asian Fashion

2006-09-14T20:18:00.000-07:00

In some ways Asian fashion industry is a cunundrum. As an industry, should it vie for a share of the European market or should it be content with its own market and continue to build that side up. Being and interested observer in Thailand, notwithstanding that there are any number of up and coming local designers such as Stretsis, Tube Gallery, Grey, Zenith and the Princess Sirivannavari Nariratana (from her latest collection shown above), the emphasis for many of them is to challenge the markets in Europe and the US before they have fully conquered there own stamping grounds.

It is a problem however that is not just confined to the Thai designers, it is the same in all of the other countries in South East Asia including Australia. Success is measured by the recognition that a designer achieves in Europe or the US and not necessarily in their own backyards. The difference for the Europeans is that hold sway not only over their own markets but also all over the rest of the worlds markets. One only has to look at the fashion representations at any international airport or up market shopping mall, the internationals firms are all there and increasing their percentage of market share. The local designers are hardly recognised outside their own countries.

So what is it these designers hope to achieve in Europe or America that they cannot achieve in Asia?

Individually, the various textile trade councils in the major centres all see their own industries in isolation as I see it. Invariably, the promoters of a Fashion Festival in each major centre see their industry as being the “Hub” of Asian fashion, dismissing of course that the same sentiment is being expressed all over and by all the other promoters. Is it just hype or is that they are not strategising where they need to be going.

Paris fashion has of course gone from the Chambre Syndicale established by Charles Worth to protect early designs to the French Federation of Women's Ready-to-Wear or the Chambres Syndical de la Couture as it is known that was created by the major players in 1929 and helped to define the direction and exclusivity of French fashion into the industry it is today. These organisations still have a significant influence over the market taken internationally and that is not in the interest of designers emanating from Asia. Web site Fashion Era presents a concise coverage of the history of Haute Couture.

So why is it that Asian Fashion designers or the Fashion industry cannot organise themselves similarly, not just form in one country as happens, but as a region, inclusive of Hong Kong, of Indonesia, of Thailand, of Singapore even China, Japan and Singapore and some of the less developed countries as well. There is a long list of fashion books dedicated to describing and understanding the French fashion industry that would provide leads on how the Europeans have dominated the fashion industry for so long

In todays international markets and more universal international fashion trends, it is something that needs to be explored if the Asian fashion industry wants to expand, which it does.

September - Your Say on Asian Fashion

2006-09-12T22:19:00.000-07:00

Got something you want to say about Asian Fashion in general? Say it here.

Improving Amatas - Your comments please

2006-09-12T14:44:00.000-07:00

It is one thing for me to say that we spend a lot of hours putting together the images for our website and building the web pages and indexes but like many web developers, we agonise for hours if not days over trying to get our "look" just right. You might find if you go back far enough that we have been through several iterations that we are constantly revising and slowly bringing up to date. It was drawn to my attention once that fashion designers like to see their garments appear in various media but they like it more if it is well done.

Ours is a content based website, with something like 50,000 images buried in there somewhere so far and as such it becomes a huge task trying to make the web navigatable and useful and retain consistency in the way we look and function. We think we have it close to a good look but we can always improve.

I am opening myself up to abuse I know but can I ask from your perspective as a web user, what would you suggest we can add/change/drop to make our website more interesting of greater value to someone like you.

Kuala Lumpur Asia Fashion Week - Nov 23-25

2006-09-12T04:49:00.000-07:00

Now into its 3rd year, Kuala Lumpur Asia Fashion Week will be taking place also in November with over 90 designers from 17 Asian countries including Australia, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam for a collective showcasing the Spring/Summer’07 creations by the latest emerging design talents from the east.

To be held at the magnificently constructed Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre (KLCC) it looks like we shall have our work cut out over the 3 days of the event.

Mercedes Benz have been a great sponsor to the event and the Fashion Awards at the end of the show. We shall add some highlights from this event to either the website or this blog when it happens.

A day in the life.

2006-09-12T00:53:00.000-07:00

Being a photographer has much to say for it however it also can mean a lot of hard work. The riser can often be bedlam with 20 or 30 photographers trying to get a spot on a 3m x 5m podium so often we are cramped for space in a dark recess at the end of the runway. Each day at a large festival I can attend up to 10 parades a day and shoot 5,000 images or more. That needs a lot of backend work sorting out the best shots, making compromises between the pose of the model, her look and the lighting. Maybe 1 in 10 shots brings it all together and somedays nothing seems to go right at all.

Lucky for me I have Akiyo who does all the downloading directly from the memory cards and then making the files and subfiles required and and puts all the images in order ready for me to go through later on. Between us we then then go through the batch processing of the images and individually tweaking them so they are ready for uploading. We try where possible these days to get at least 2 good shots of every garment, a good long shot and a closeup. It is only occasionally where something will stop working unexpectedly and we might miss out on a garment or a particular shot. One of the difficulties is that you are never quite sure what the choreographer has arranged nor how the models are going to enter or even where they will walk on the runway.

Generally after a day of shows we might try to find a restaurant that is open late to have a bite to eat and there have been plenty of times we couldn't and then head back to the hotel to work on getting the images ready and fitted to the webpages sometimes until 3 in the morning. I always find that after any festival I need at least a week to recover and so return to our small island hideaway where I have a good steam sauna and massage.

That is a general overview of what we do. In future I will try to give you more of the daily grind and problems we encounter and interviews with some of the people we meet. Feel free to ask any questions or make a comment on runway photography.

Singapore Fashion Week - 2 - 4 Nov

2006-09-11T22:16:00.000-07:00

Singapore Fashion Week will be taking place this year at the Singapore Expo during the first weeks of November for those that have not already been made aware. A combination of Labels Asia and Intimate Asia the show promises to have some of the best fashion from this part of the world. Some 74 exhibitors from 11 countries are lined up for the event over 3 days from the 2 Nov to 4 Nov.

Singapore companies and labels like Lab2Design, TOob Inc, Blush!, Utopia and Vizon are already on board, alongside Jattinn Kochar from India, Aitch K from Hong Kong,

For more details look at their website Singapore Fashion Week

Hong Kong Fashion Week - July 2006

2006-09-11T20:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Another day, another show

2006-09-11T17:22:00.000-07:00

Hi and welcome to my new blog.

I am looking at the date of this posting and am reminded of how 5 years ago the world was turned on its head with and act of violence that has probably affected us all in some way or other. My condolences go out to those people who lost someone in this event of 9/11 -2001.

As a fashion photographer I am lucky enough to be part of an industry that is exciting and lively, filled with beautiful fashion, glamorous models and thousands of people in the background who go towards making it as all come together. I have decided to do this as we get a lot of people wanting to ask all sorts of questions about the Amatas website and the various Asian Fashion Festivals often they are the same questions being asked over and over. I figured the best way to handle some of these is to put a more general spin on all of the Fashion Festivals we attend and how we are developing our website in particular. Also it would think it might be a good way for people to catch up with some of the news that we get from the organisers and the designers themselves.

At any fashion show, lots of interesting things happen in the background, intersting people we meet, the designers themselves and general chit chat about the Asian fashion Industry, it will also give us a chance to further develop the concepts we have for the Asian Fashion Network that we are doing to assist in promoting the work of the creative designers that go towards making this industry as exciting as it is.

I promise I shall try to be regular and hope that you take the time to make comments on things we have been doing or will be doing in the future. We look forward to your comments and gossip about the industry and hope you take the time to join in.

In the meantime, hope you enjoy our photos on Amatas and the spin on the Asian Fashion Industry as we see it.

Steve.