Portugal Kid's Fashion Week

This weekend the beautiful city of Porto played host to Portugal Fashion Week, and for the first time children’s fashion is part of the programme with the launch of their Kid’s Fashion Week. The beautifully produced shows meant we were introduced to a selection of diverse fashion designers from the women’s and menswear collections. Just look at Marques’ Almeida or Susana Bettencourt. This is just the beginning of something that is looking to group together the best kid’s fashion labels in Portugal and communicate to the world what these Portuguese design lead children’s fashion designers can do.

There was a small group of designers exhibiting in the dedicated showroom, and four brands taking part in the multi-brand runway show which took place on the Sunday morning. The quality of production on the show was good with each brand stamping their own identity on their individual segments of the show. (Laranjinha, Turquesa Beach, Phi Clothing and Play Up ). Maybe a change to the runway show timetable so that it could be sandwiched between the women’s and men’s shows on the Saturday would maximise the impact for the brands. This could help with the cross-over of International press covering the ‘grownup’ fashion and expose them to the wealth of Portuguese kid’s fashion.

There are some amazingly creative Portuguese kid’ s wear designers, and Portugal Kid’s Fashion Week can be a powerful vehicle to communicate to the world how strong their kids fashion pedigree is. However the ‘kid’s fashion’ needs to be billed alongside the women’s and men’s designers with this being the opportunity to lead the way for Kids Fashion Week integration.

Porto itself is the most beautiful location to host the show and it was a pleasure to be invited. I attended with Petra Barkhof and we were able to spend a lovely evening with Alejandra from Severina kids in the wonderful restaurant O Travessa.

The mixture of rustic beautiful historic architecture, emerging cool venues, fashion, and the friendly people ignited a conversation between Petra and myself about whether we could, or should live here. I think so… watch out Florence R!

Portugal Kid’s Fashion Week has got something that could be very special enabling the Portuguese kid’s fashion labels to collectively communicate to the world from the most beautiful of settings just how good they are.

Editors Notes: Thank you Portugal Fashion Week & Moda Portugal for the wonderful hospitality –  it was lovely to catch up with you in your home town of Porto Barn of Monkeys, Cherrypapaya and Kaleidoscope kids.