Where Are The Tourists?

The annual Lagos Fashion and Design Week (#LFDW) has come and gone and designers, models, fashion bloggers, style enthusiast and fashion critics came to play. However, I feel a very important class of persons are missing from this list….the tourist!

Where are the tourists?

When I think of Fashion Week, the “Big Four” cities, New York, Paris, London and Milan come to mind. The build up to Fashion Week in these top four global cities is insane and the planning is second to none. It kicks off with a media frenzy on both traditional and new media with people anticipating what top designers have in store for the season.  The latest trends are also set during fashion week and for upcoming designers, it’s a great platform to showcase their work. Street style is also a major part of fashion week. It’s almost as huge as the runway show itself and gives fashionistas the opportunity to fully express themselves in any and every possible way. These cities understand that shopping is a major tourist activity and have not left the fashion tourists behind. There is a conscious effort to push Fashion Week to showcase the city’s fashion credibility. Shopping tourism is one of the most used tools to sell a destination and a fashionable city will attract tourists.  Everyone, fashion conscious or not, would want to visit one of the world’s fashion capital someday.

NYFW Fashion Week generates an income of 513.5 million euros per event and this is more than the US Open and the NYC Marathon. Fashion Week in New York brings in about 150,000 unique visitors per season and the average visitor spends 2,226 euros during the event. Coming close to NYFW is London Fashion week with 105,000 visitors and 2,225 spend per visitor*

These global fashion cities have recognized that shopping is one of the criteria travellers consider when choosing destination. Nigerians are generally very big on fashion and one will expect that the LFDW will be an opportunity to show the rest of the world our impeccable taste in fashion and creativity. Sell Nigeria to the world. However, we need to ask ourselves, are Nigerian designers appealing to foreigners? How can we get foreigners to consume more Nigerian fashion?

We caught up with three Fashion enthusiasts who had this to say on the Fashion Industry and Fashion Tourism.

The truth is less than 10% of designers based in Nigeria are known internationally. However, some designers have made a mark outside the shores of our continent. Even with these, how easily available are their pieces? Where are their ads? Do they sponsor international Fashion events/shows? To get an international fashion audience and customers, we should be strategic within ourselves. First of all, we need our government to take this industry seriously.We need structured training and apprenticeships to harness skills of the young ones.We need established designers to work creatively with fashion bloggers.- Stephanie “Metrogypsie” Okafor – Fashion Blogger

“Fashion week has a several advantages and can advance a country’s local and regional economy. Fashion should be a new anchor for its countries tourism industry. Singapore for instance has fashion week and the Singapore tourism board includes fashion as one of the high-profile components for enhancing the city as a tourist destination. Another example is Seoul who has two fashion weeks a year, and because of these events, a huge amount of complex shopping malls and wholesale retailers have attracted more than two million visitors in a year and have created jobs and opportunities for business” – Fashion enthusiast and Editor-in-chic of Schick magazine, Simisola Esiri

I commend the growth of the fashion industry in Nigeria and applaud designers for their creativity. However, Nigerian designers need to perfect their craft to compete at an international scale. Clothing items from a high fashion brand should not have lopsided stitches or zips out-of-place. Those are the little details that make you different from a regular tailor on the streets of Lagos. They should not put out items with defects for sale. International buyers look out for these hitches. Additionally, most designers lack the capacity to produce at a large-scale and cannot meet up with the demands of an international distributors. – Dedun Olobayo, stylemeafrica.com

Fashion Tourism, like every other type of Tourism in Nigeria, has great potential and one can only hope we take advantage of the uniqueness we can offer the world.

*Statistics were obtained from fashionunited.com

Photo Credit

360 Nobs