MANILA: For anybody remotely interested in luxury style and culture, fashion week is the date to mark. Just a little over a week ago, luxury houses concluded their shows and presentations for their Fall-Winter collections, marking the debuts of new creative directors and ushering in trends to define the rest of the year.
While unveiling the next season’s garments is more than enough entertainment for certain onlookers, all eyes can be found on the front row. Fashion week has become a trending topic not only for the style moments but also for the stars making their appearances in full-brand looks.
However, those at the helm of luxury seem to have been gearing East, with K-pop idols and Thai actors becoming front-row mainstays. Fashion week fever has also hit the Philippines with the steady increase of Filipino attendees in this year’s Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks.
Homegrown style icon Heart Evangelista (pic) was in attendance for the Prada and Off-White shows, while beauty queen Pia Wurtzbach was seen at the Fendi, Bally, and Prada shows. Actress Max Collins enjoyed her second fashion week cycle at Loewe and Lacoste, and model Kelsey Merritt made appearances for Hermès and Dior.
The rise of Filipino public figures at fashion week can be attributed to their ability to bring in a key metric fashion houses look for: media impact value (MIV). This statistic, as measured by tech and social analytics firm Launchmetrics, helps brands identify the monetary gain they’d likely get from posts, articles, and social media interactions mentioning their celebrity guests.
Veterans Evangelista and Wurtzbach respectively generated US$10.6 million and US$7 million, respectively, for Fashion Week SS25 last September. During this season, Filipino celebrities overtook South Korean reps in accumulated MIV for the first time due to higher post quantity and frequency from the former. This is a huge feat given the long-term influence K-pop idols and Hallyu actors hold in luxury fashion, and it shows how the Philippines is gradually becoming a market of significant interest.
An increase in Filipino presence in these areas is directly related to South-East Asia’s emergence as the next leading market for luxury. The region brought in over US$14 billion in revenue in 2022, and Bain & Company projects that South-East Asia will surpass the likes of the Middle East and Latin America in economic growth. Given this upcoming boom, it makes sense that 25 per cent of Filipino, Malaysian, and Vietnamese consumers share inclinations of spending more on luxury items, and 42 per cent of South-East Asian consumers see themselves maintaining their spending patterns regardless of inflation, as revealed by Milieu Insights. - Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN
