In May 2013, Japanese designer Jun Okamoto was on the programme of Audi Fashion Festival Singapore. He appeared alongside names such as Carolina Herrera, Hussein Chalayan, Peter Pilotto and Tsumori Chisato. For a Tokyo-based label, it was a chance to present its work to a Southeast Asian audience.
The festival ran from 15 to 19 May 2013 at The Tent@Marina Promenade, behind the Singapore Flyer. The exact date and time of Okamoto’s own show are not confirmed here, so it is placed only within those five days.
The festival he walked into
The 2013 edition marked the fifth anniversary of Audi Fashion Festival Singapore. It also changed location. Earlier editions were held on Orchard Road, and 2013 moved to the waterfront at Marina Promenade, with the city skyline as a backdrop.
Organisers built a bigger tent and aimed to draw more than 20,000 visitors, up from 13,200 in 2012. The theme was “Crafting the Future”, and the programme ran over five days. It mixed emerging and established names from the international fashion world, and it had the support of the Singapore Tourism Board.
Okamoto was in a line-up that also included Collette Dinnigan, Ashley Isham and Singapore labels such as Raoul, Zardoze and Ong Shunmugam. Shunmugam showed on 18 May 2013 as part of the Future Fashion Now x Parco Japan showcase.
The format was unusual. Fashionista noted that part of the seating was sold to the public, with tickets ranging from S$40 to S$100. That made the shows a consumer event as well as a trade one. The festival ran alongside the Blueprint trade show, the Asia Fashion Summit and the Audi Star Creation contest, all in the same vicinity for the first time.
The collection behind the show
Okamoto’s most recent runway season before the festival was autumn/winter 2013. WWD reviewed that collection on 22 March 2013. It said a major design motif was a landscape print of a starry sky, which appeared on several pieces. The same outlet had earlier covered his spring 2013 collection as a summery set of breezy dresses and voluminous separates in featherweight fabrics.
That gives a sense of what a Singapore audience would have been looking at. The clothes were softly shaped, with a romantic and nature-inspired mood, in a climate where light fabrics matter.
Why a Japanese label belonged in the line-up
Fashionista described the festival’s character as a mix of local designers launching their latest collections and international designers showing theirs for a second time to a new audience. Tsumori Chisato’s autumn/winter 2013 collection is one example. She showed it in Singapore months after its debut at Paris Fashion Week. Okamoto’s autumn/winter 2013 collection had likewise already been shown, in March, before it reached the festival’s tent.
Japan had a clear presence in the programme. The Parco Japan partnership brought a showcase that also included Singapore’s Ong Shunmugam. Okamoto and Chisato represented Japanese design on the main stage.
What happened to the festival
Audi Fashion Festival Singapore had begun under that name in 2009, when Audi became its title sponsor. It returned to Tent@Orchard in 2014. In 2015 the event was rebranded as Singapore Fashion Week, although it continued to be known as the Audi Fashion Festival Singapore.
Ong Shunmugam, who showed alongside Okamoto in 2013, was one of five Singaporean labels chosen for solo shows at the 2014 festival. Thirteen years after that fifth-anniversary edition, the Marina Promenade tent remains a one-year chapter in the festival’s history, with 2013 the only year the event was held there.