The China International Fashion Week (2018/19 A/W Series) was ended with elegant music slowly stopping at 751D·PARK on April 1, in the warm but still cold spring day, steadily taking a new step after its 20th anniversary.

It was proposed that "The socialism with Chinese characteristics entered a new era" in the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC). This new era is also a new age for China's fashion and Chinese creativity to set off sail again. "Smart persons will change with times and wise persons will make with things." As the window of the world’s focus on the Chinese fashion, and vivid illustration of the beauty economy, national rejuvenation, and cultural confidence, the China International Fashion Week is innovating the practice and exploring the development direction of the Chinese fashion industry in the wake of the transformation of the industrial development and the change of social environment under the background of the "new age".

Zhang Qinghui, Chairman of the China Fashion Designers Association, believes that the resource combination pattern of the traditional industry supply chain has changed greatly with the informationized communication and transmission form. A series of changes have rooted in the Chinese fashion industry development and brought great changes to the way of industrial organization, so that the new industrial organization mode is running and the new fashion week model also forming and practicing.

Powerfully "linking" all resources such as fashion and commerce, fashion and art, fashion and city, and fashion and public daily life, fashion and informatization, digitization, and intelligence, as well as fashion and the whole international fashion industry chain link in a seamless manner, the fashion week actively adapted to the industrial structure change and consumption pattern upgrade in the new digitalized era, pooling social resources of the upstream and downstream industries, inside and outside the fashion industry, so as to provide more docking services between commercial and industrial resources for the designers and brands participating in the fashion week and promote the better realization of the Chinese fashion’s discourse power.

Dozens of brands leading in the Chinese fashion industry and almost covering the whole categories of products, and both mature and young designers representing the major force of the Chinese fashion industry, including Ji Wenbo, Yang Ziming, Wang Yutao, Liu Wei, Chen Wen, Grace Chen, Lan Yu, Deng Zhaoping, and Hu Sheguang, held a total of 63 fashion shows, displaying the new style and features of the China fashion of the "new era" to the world.

It is the industry value direction the China International Fashion Week has always been advocating to inherit and carry forward the culture on the premise of contemporariness, blend intangible cultural heritages in daily life, and make the oriental aesthetics achieve activation and become one of the performances of cultural confidence; while inheriting and applying the Chinese traditional culture and costume elements has also been a distinct cultural attribute of the China International Fashion Week. Chinese fashion designers have been seeking for juncture between the Chinese traditional crafts and traditional culture elements and global fashion for many years. In the new rapid outbreak period of the Chinese fashion industry, designers present rich diversity in terms of the expression of the traditional Chinese culture, especially the activation and inheritance of the intangible cultural heritages. Yiwen has been adhering to the Chinese hand workshop over the past 15 years by "reviving" the traditional beauty of traditional handmade embroidery with the force of modern fashion, vividly inheriting the culture with " people, things, and life", and also involving the targeted poverty alleviation; Yang Ziming with his new works, "history hidden in characters and meaning set in clothes", and Huang Gang with the evolvement of the Chinese characters, expresses the continuity and inheritance of culture and civilization; Mao Geping combined the freehand brushwork lines and color fading of the oriental aesthetics with the three-dimensional light and shadow structure in the western art; Wang Ying scattered and reconstructed the Chinese elements and presented them in geometric patterns; Xiong Ying showed the Chinese children's martial arts dream in the dream lake with clear and beautiful silk rhymes and armed battle armors; Lin Qi combined different regional dialects and displayed the cultural character with blue prints, natural dyeing, bamboo weaving, traditional Chinese painting dyestuff, Kunqu opera, etc.; CHAN ZHE transformed the "fingertip culture" into "fingertip economy" by virtue of the Miao embroidery of Guizhou; Xie Jiaqi aimed at Dunhuang and the western region and combined different art forms to echo the Belt And Road initiative; Li Zhen expanded the creativity from outline, the core technique of the Chinese painting; Yu Jia paid tribute to the famous poets with the exquisite decorative effect of the costumes of the Qing Dynasty; Hao Weimin reproduced the traditional lasting appeal with the Chinese ancient embroidery techniques and cloud sea patterns printed by hand; Feng Sansan combined many Tibetan Buddhist elements to present the "cultural classics" worn on the body; Cheng Hao innovated the expression form of the national intangible heritage by using Miao folk stories; Zhao Ziming extended the design of the new Chinese style from the Zen concept of the oriental philosophy. Widely used in fashion creative works, the Chinese culture reveals the necessary connection between fashion progress and cultural heritage, "better constructs the Chinese spirit, Chinese value, and China's power", and "promotes creative transformation and innovative development of the Chinese excellent traditional culture".

Sun Ruizhe, Chairman of the China Textile Industry Association pointed out: "The advent of the era of a new round of technological innovation waves represented by information technology, intelligent manufacturing, and new energy and new material, has brought the unprecedented historical opportunity for the upgrade of the traditional garment industry." Scientific and technological innovation, and material innovation have become the special highlights attracting great attention in the China International Fashion Week this year. Chen Wen and Adriano Goldschmied, two Chinese and Western denim designers masters, teamed up with the Cotton Council International (CCI) launched the U.S. cotton-rich knitted fabric and woven denim fabrics from the COTTON USA certificated manufacturers in China and combined with the patented technological innovation of SolucellAir™ , which attracted great concern in the industry; Deng Zhaoping, together with the member enterprises of the Imide Alliance, displayed the attractive consumer experience brought by the functional characteristics of PI material such as environmental protection, performance and texture quality through diverse products of new categories including two-sided woolen cloth, artificial fur, and new sweater polyimide; Liu Wei, launched Towards Ocean with the latest functional fabrics featuring moisture absorption, sweat releasing, sun protection, anti-perspiration &water stain, UV protection, wind and moisture proof, etc.; "To strengthen China's innovation and competitiveness, it is necessary to give full play to the leading and supporting role of scientific and technological innovation and make innovation  become the first driving force of the high quality development in the process of promoting such development." Chinese fashion practitioners are practicing this spirit with their continuous efforts.

With the continuous improvement of the economic development level and mass consumption ability, and wide application in various industries of the Internet and digital technology, the Chinese fashion has entered the era of new consumption of personalized upgrade. In this new era with post-1980s, post-1990s and post-2000s generations as the main consumption forces, the rise of children's clothing brands and popular brands is unstoppable. In the Fashion Week of this season, the children's clothes s aiming at the multiple aspects including children's life and parent-child family are fashionable and contain strong humanistic color, such as Fashion Union which combines the happy and enjoyable shopping of fashion experiencing type and new retail mode of showroom, BINGCHUAN which expresses feather fashion, WECTMONO with a passion for the locomotive culture, which have become the representatives of popular brands interpreting the street fashion tides with graffiti, sports, and music. "Fashion is always for the young." The China International Fashion Week showed the fashion trend exclusive for the younger generation, which is the future demand of Chinese fashion consumers.

It is the industrial function of the China International Fashion Week as an incubation platform for new young designers that has the same youth characteristics. With the development of the times, a large number of highly educated young design talents with overseas education background have grown over time, who have the understanding of the Chinese traditional culture, industry, and market, and also international vision and sensitivity. It has been one of the characteristics of the China International Fashion Week to discover and cultivate such young designers with differentiated special contests and promote their growth through the platform effect and incubation ability of the fashion week.

For the growth of new young fashion designers, the China International Fashion Week is providing all the designers with much convenient assistance in the creative design, fashion marketing, brand building and cultural confidence through the perfection of its functions.

Teamed up with the CCAGM, the China International Fashion Week introduced The Orange of Taikoo Li Sanlitun, Galeries Lafayette, and other famous business circles, the fashion landmarks in Beijing, as the show scenes, following Parkview Green and China Central Place, so as to make fashion and business further integrate more closely and expand the contemporary fashion culture and creative design into the society, by covering nearly all fashion landmarks in Beijing, building DHUB, 10+3 SHOWROOM, and other platforms for landing commerce, and facing the public with the brand promotion mode of "showing what to be bought".

As a designers’ platform with unique business value in the China International Fashion Week, the DHUB created an internationalized comprehensive service platform, integrating multiple functions such as product purchase, business negotiation, channel development, trend release, brand promotion, cross-border cooperation and technical exchanges, at Taikoo Li Sanlitun South and 751D•PARK, the two trend landmarks in Beijing, where the excellent works from more than 50 domestic and foreign designer brands were showed.

Among them, pop-up stores became the new landmark in the DHUB. On March 25 to April 1, 2018, those pop-up stores introduced in the DHUB gathered the fashion clothes and accessories of extreme vitality and personality designed by nearly 30 excellent designers from mainland China, Hong Kong, the United States, Europe and Asian countries, providing the group of young designers with a better opportunity to land business. As a new collection point of fashion, pop-up shops are expected to find new modes of cooperation in the fashion week.

As an entity interactive platform integrating multiple functions including modelling matching, static display, fashion show, product order and dialogue salon, 10+3 SHOWROOM Young Designer Base Plan made the 7th stage pose by means of linkage with the business circles, directly  facing consumers. 13 10+3 SHOWROOM designers participating in this show presented several categories covering men's wear, women's wear, parent-child clothing, shoes, bags and suitcases, etc. and have different brand styles, integrating the traditional culture and international diversified design style.

Zhang Qinghui commented that the 10+3 SHOWROOM series projects were built to better help excellent designers realize the commercial landing of their brands, let the product creative design of the designer brand dock with retail terminals, bring unique consumer experience to the masses, and allow the designers to face customers, experiencing the value balance between commercial landing and creativity.

Today, the China International Fashion Week has become more diverse in terms of presentation form. In addition to launch of new products, fashionable activities in more various forms are used to support the Chinese fashion industry practitioners to express their fashion attitude to the world, and continuously advance and change with the development of the times so as to meet the requirements of different fashion elements for the Fashion Week as a comprehensive platform.

On March 28 to 30, Beijing Fashion Forum was held at The Orange, Taikoo Li Sanlitun South. The Beijing Fashion Forum is divided into three themes: "Green sustainable development trend", "Business development trend" and "Art lecture hall". Various brand representatives, designers and experts from home and abroad gathered together to discuss about the topics such as green sustainable development, the relationship between fashion brands and capital strength, the attraction of business forms in the group of independent designers, and how to embrace the modern civilization in inheriting the Chinese traditional culture. These topics are not only the future trend practitioners of the Chinese fashion industry are concerned about urgently, but also the starting point for the future development of the Chinese fashion industry.

In addition, the Fashion Week introduced transboundary art museums including Madame Tussauds Beijing and Beijing Minsheng Museum of Modern Fine Arts to develop the content of the fashion culture and promote the formation of "big fashion" with help of multiple art strengths from artists, art galleries and so on.

It is the first step to explore the future for the China International Fashion Week to carry out overall attempts in activity pattern, platform service, supply of industrial chain and social resource utilization. This exploration is also the innovation of the China International Fashion Week, as the only one purely market-oriented fashion week operated without financial support of governments in China, to constantly improve the operation and management ability, raise the level of marketized and commercial operation, improve the professional service quality for brands and designers, seek for greater trust of companies and creative people in the industry, and win more social attention online and offline.

Entering into the AI era, the expert pointed out that the international fashion cultural communication occurred in the west in the last century and has transferred to the east today. China has increasingly become the center of fashion communication, and the fashion trends from the east would continuously enrich and promote the integration of the fashion industry across space and time, cross regions, and cross cultures; with comprehensive reference to the development modes of other industries, the China International Fashion Week would lay the future emphases on becoming a transboundary platform which can comprehensively implement the global linkage of the fashion industry and meet the individual demand in the industry, and also try to realize the internal guidance for domestic consumption and external presentation of cultural confidence through linkage of the whole social resources, by virtue of its own advantages of several platforms and the whole platforms, via obtaining users’ viscosity and time based on the fashion industry.

Zhang Qinghui, Chairman of the China Fashion Designers Association, believed that: "the new era needs new actions and also a new orientation. Under the support of the increasingly changing Internet technology, the people’s increasingly demand for fashionable life and the broad market space brought by the "Belt And Road" initiative have provided a great era foundation for upgrading the Chinese fashion industry. On this basis, the new positioning of the China International Fashion Week should be how to establish the fashion standard based on the oriental aesthetic value and rooted in the traditional Chinese culture. "

China, which is becoming one of the most influential poles in the global fashion circle, is also faced with the same impact from changes of the industrial foundation as western countries, for example, the changes facing the future are also occurring in Paris, Milan, New York, and London. The digitalized functional data of the fashion week platform, the creative design from cloud computing, and the intelligent fashion consumption constantly push the traditional system to make changes.

It requires more practices and longer time to test how to measure the changes of the system of the China International Fashion Week for the "new era". With the rapid development of science and technology, what is the value of the fashion week? What do brands really need to do on the fashion week? Who is the target audience for the fashion week? All these questions from the research report, Front Row of Fashion Show: The Voice of Fashion Week in the Digital Age, are also the practices of the China International Fashion Week trying to find solutions to changes.