Kali­fa Clyne

Fash­ion Week T&T (FWTT) will take place from Oc­to­ber 24 to 28 af­ter a one-year hia­tus. Al­though de­tails have not been fi­nalised, the lo­cal fash­ion event will be held for the first three days in Trinidad and the oth­er two days in To­ba­go. In an in­ter­view, chair­man of FWTT, An­tho­ny Ra­hael, said ap­proval for the event was ob­tained in a let­ter on Tues­day from the Min­istry of Plan­ning and the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try. He added: "Last year we did not have fash­ion week be­cause we were un­able to get spon­sors. "This year Gov­ern­ment has said yes and it gives us a start so that we may now go for­ward and at­tempt to source pri­vate fund­ing." Ra­hael said de­sign­ers would show their col­lec­tions at the show for the 2013 sea­son. "Fash­ion is a sea­son­al thing and there are dif­fer­ent sea­sons so we opt­ed to show dur­ing Oc­to­ber for the 2013 sea­son," said Ra­hael.

He said the de­ci­sion to stage the show at the end of Oc­to­ber was to avoid hav­ing it clash with fash­ion week events in New York and Paris. He said the T&T Coali­tion of Ser­vice and In­dus­try had been in­stru­men­tal in as­sist­ing with get­ting fund­ing for the event. He added: "They un­der­stand that if man­aged cor­rect­ly, fash­ion in this coun­try could be a bil­lion-dol­lar in­dus­try. "It's not just the de­sign­ers and mod­els, there are al­so the gar­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers, styl­ists, make-up artists, pho­tog­ra­phers, cam­era­men and light­ing tech­ni­cians." Ra­hael said FWTT was com­mit­ted to en­sur­ing the fash­ion week would be on par with in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards. "We are invit­ing for­eign buy­ers and me­dia and we will al­so in­cor­po­rate the 50th In­de­pen­dence an­niver­sary cel­e­bra­tions," Ra­hael added.